The principles of psychology

AMERICAN SCIENCE SERIES-ADVANCED COURSE

THE PRINCIPLES

OP

PSYCHOLOGY

BY

WILLIAM JAMES

/ y
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

NEW YORK
HENRY HOL'J' AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1890

BY
HENRY HOLT & CO

COPYRIGHT, 1918

BY

ALICE H. JAMES
August, 1931

BF

I8<f0

YJ

PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY DEAR FRIEND

FRANCOIS PILLON.

AS A TOKEN OF AFFECTION,

AND AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF WHAT I OWE
TO THE

CRITIQUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.

PREFACE.

THE treatise which follows has in the main grown up in
connection with the author's class-room instruction in
Psychology, although it is true that some of the chapters
are more * metaphysical,' and others fuller of detail, than
is suitable for students who are going over the subject for
the first time. The consequence of this is that, in spite of
the exclusion of the important subjects of pleasure and
pain, and moral and aesthetic feelings and judgments, the
work has grown to a length which no one can regret more
than the writer himself. The man must indeed be sanguine
who, in this crowded age, can hope to have many readers
for fourteen hundred continuous pages from his pen. But
wer Vieles bringt wird Manchem etivas bringen ; and, by judi
ciously skipping according to their several needs, I am sure
that many sorts of readers, even those who are just begin
ning the study of the subject, will find my book of use.
Since the beginners are most in need of guidance, I sug
gest for their behoof that they omit altogether on a first
reading chapters 6, 7, 8, 10 (from page 330 to page 371),
12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 21, and 28. The better to awaken the
neophyte's interest, it is possible that the wise order would
be to pass directly from chapter 4 to chapters 23, 24, 25,
and 26, and thence to return to the first volume again.
Chapter 20, on Space-perception, is a terrible thing, which,
unless written with all that detail, could not be fairly
treated at all. An abridgment of it, called ' The Spatial
Quale,' which appeared in the Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, vol. xm. p. 64, may be found by some per
sons a useful substitute for the entire chapter.

I have kept close to the point of view of natural science
throughout the book. Every natural science assumes cer-

vi PREFACE.

tain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the ele
ments between which its own ' laws ' obtain, and from
which its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, the
science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1)
thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and
space with which they coexist and which (3) they know. Of
course these data themselves are discussable ; but the dis
cussion of them (as of other elements) is called meta
physics and falls outside the province of this book. This
book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are
vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology
when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the
various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions
of the brain, can go no farther — can go no farther, that is,
as a natural science. If she goes farther she becomes
metaphysical. All attempts to explain our phenomenally
given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities
(whether the latter be named ' Soul,' ' Transcendental
Ego,' ' Ideas,' or ' Elementary Units of Consciousness ') are
metaphysical. This book consequently rejects both the
associationist and the spiritualist theories ; and in this
strictly positivistic point of view consists the only feature
of it for which I feel tempted to claim originality. Of
course this point of view is anything but ultimate. Men
must keep thinking ; and the data assumed by psychology,
just like those assumed by physics and the other natural
sciences, must some time be overhauled. The effort to
overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics ;
but metaphysics can only perform her task well when dis
tinctly conscious of its great extent. Metaphysics fragmen
tary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that
she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she in
jects herself into a natural science. And it seems to me
that the theories both of a spiritual agent and of associated
* ideas' are, as they figure in the psychology-books, just such
metaphysics as this. Even if their results be true, it
would be as well to keep them, as thus presented, out of
psychology as it is to keep the results of idealism out of
physics.

I have therefore treated our passing thoughts as inte-

PREFACE. Vll

gers, and regarded tlie mere laws of their coexistence with
brain-states as the ultimate laws for our science. The
reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book.
It is mainly a mass of descriptive details, running out into
queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of
her task can hope successfully to deal with. That will
perhaps be centuries hence ; and meanwhile the best mark
of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming
front.

The completion of the book has been so slow that
several chapters have been published successively in Mind,
the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, the Popular Science
Monthly, and Scribner's Magazine. Acknowledgment is
made in the proper places.

The bibliography, I regret to say, is quite unsystem
atic. I have habitually given my authority for special
experimental facts ; but beyond that I have aimed mainly
to cite books that would probably be actually used by
the ordinary American college-student in his collateral
reading. The bibliography in W. Volkmann von Yolkmar's
Lehrbuch der Psychologic (1875) is so complete, up to its
date, that there is no need of an inferior duplicate. And
for more recent references, Sully's Outlines, Dewey's Psy
chology, and Baldwin's Handbook of Psychology may be
advantageously used.

Finally, where one owes to so many, it seems absurd to
single out particular creditors ; yet I cannot resist the
temptation at the end of my first literary venture to record
my gratitude for the inspiration I have got from the writ
ings of J. S. Mill, Lotze, Benouvier, Hodgson, and Wundt,
and from the intellectual companionship (to name only five
names) of Chauncey Wright and Charles Peirce in old
times, and more recently of Stanley Hall, James Putnam,
and Josiah Royce.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY, August 1890.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PA09

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY, 1

Mental Manifestations depend on Cerebral Conditions, 1.
Pursuit of ends and choice are the marks of Mind's presence, 6.

CHAPTER II.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN, 12

Reflex, semi-reflex, and voluntary acts, 12. The Frog's nerve-
centres, 14. General notion of the hemispheres, 20. Their
Education — the Meynert scheme, 24. The phrenological con
trasted with the physiological conception, 27. The localization
of function in the hemispheres, 30. The motor zone, 31. Motor
Aphasia, 37. The sight-centre, 41. Mental blindness, 48. The
hearing-centre, 52. Sensory Aphasia, 54. Centres for smell and
taste, 57. The touch-centre, 58. Man's Consciousness limited to
the hemispheres, 65. The restitution of function, 67. Final
correction of the Meynert scheme, 73. Conclusions, 78.

CHAPTER III.
ON SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY, . 81

The summation of Stimuli, 82. Reaction-time, 85. Cerebral
blood-supply, 97. Cerebral Thermometry, 99. Phosphorus and
Thought, 101.

CHAPTER IV.
HABIT, 104

Due to plasticity of neural matter, 105. Produces ease of
action, 112. Diminishes attention, 115. Concatenated perform
ances, 116. Ethical implications and pedagogic maxims, 120.

CHAPTER V.

THE AUTOMATON-THEORY, 128

The theory described, 128. Reasons for it, 133. Reasons
against it, 138.

iz

X CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VI.

P40B

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY, 145

Evolutionary Psychology demands a Mind-dust, 146. Some
alleged proofs that it exists, 150. Refutation of these proofs, 154.
Self-compounding of mental facts is inadmissible, 158. Can
states of mind be unconscious? 162. Refutation of alleged proofs
of unconscious thought, 164. Difficulty of stating the connection
between mind and brain, 176. ' The Soul ' is logically the least
objectionable hypothesis, 180. Conclusion, 182.

CHAPTER VII.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY, . . . 183

Psychology is a natural Science, 183. Introspection, 185.
Experiment, 192. Sources of error, 194. The ' Psychologist's
fallacy,' 196.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS, . . .199

Time relations : lapses of Consciousness— Locke «. Descartes,
200. The 'unconsciousness' of hysterics not genuine, 202.'
Minds may split into dissociated parts, 206. Space-relations!
the Seat of the Soul, 214. Cognitive relations, 216. The Psychol
ogist's point of view, 218. Two kinds of knowledge, acquaint
ance and knowledge about, 221.

CHAPTER IX.
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT, . 224

Consciousness tends to the personal form, 225. It is in con
stant change, 229. It is sensibly continuous, 237. • Substantive '
'and ' transitive ' parts of Consciousness, 243. Feelings of rela
tion, 245. Feelings of tendency, 249. The 'fringe' of the
object, 258. The feeling of rational sequence, 261. Thought
possible in any kind of mental material, 265. Thought and lan
guage, 267. Consciousness is cognitive, 271. The word Object

275. Every cognition is due to one integral pulse of thought'

276. Diagrams of Thought's stream, 279. Thought is always
selective, 284. J

CHAPTER X.
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF, ... 291

The Empirical Self or Me, 291. Its constituents, 292* The

material self, 292. The Social Self, 293. The Spiritual Self, 296

acuity of apprehending Thought as a purely spiritual activity'

CONTENTS. XI

PAGK

299. Emotions of Self, 305. Rivalry and conflict of one's different
selves, 309. Their hierarchy, 313. What Self we love in ' Self-
love,' 317. The Pure Ego, 329. The verifiable ground of the
sense of personal identity, 332. The passing Thought is the only
Thinker which Psychology requires, 338. Theories of Self-con
sciousness : 1) The theory of the Soul, 342. 2) The Association ist
theory, 350. 3) The Transcendentalist theory, 360. The muta
tions of the Self, 373. Insane delusions, 375. Alternating selves,
379. Mediumships or possessions, 393. Summary, 400.

CHAPTER XI.
ATTENTION, 402

Its neglect by English psychologists, 402. Description of it,
404. To how many things can we attend at ouce? 405. Wundt's
experiments on displacement of date of impressions simultaneously
attended to, 410. Personal equation, 413. The varieties of
attention, 416. Passive attention, 418. Voluntary attention, 420.
Attention's effects on sensation, 425 ; — on discrimination, 426 ; —
on recollection, 427 ;— on reaction-time, 427. The neural pro
cess in attention : 1) Accommodation of sense-organ, 434.
2) Preperception, 438. Is voluntary attention a resultant or a
force? 447. The effort to attend can be conceived as a
resultant, 450. Conclusion, 453. Acquired Inattention, 455.

CHAPTER XII.
CONCEPTION, 459

The sense of sameness, 459. Conception defined, 461. Con
ceptions are unchangeable, 464. Abstract ideas, 468. Universals,
473. The conception ' of the same ' is not the ' same state ' of
mind, 480.

CHAPTER XIII.
DISCRIMINATION AND COMPARISON, 483

Locke on discrimination, 483. Martineau ditto, 484. Simul
taneous sensations originally fuse into one object, 488. The
principle of mediate comparison, 489. Not all differences are
differences of composition, 490. The conditions of discrimina
tion, 494. The sensation of difference, 495. The transcendental-
ist theory of the perception of differences uncalled for, 498. The
process of analysis, 502. The process of abstraction, 505. The
improvement of discrimination by practice, 508. Its two causes,
510. Practical interests limit our discrimination, 515. Reaction-
time after discrimination, 523. The perception of likeness, 528.
The magnitude of differences, 530. The measurement of dis-

xii CONTENTS.

PAGE

criminative sensibility : Weber's law, 533. Fechner's interpreta
tion of this as the psycho-physic law, 537. Criticism thereof, 545.

CHAPTER XIV.

ASSOCIATION, 550

The problem of the connection of our thoughts, 550. It
depends on mechanical conditions, 553. Association is of objects
thought- of, not of ' ideas,' 554. The rapidity of association, 557.
The ' law of contiguity,' 561. The elementary law of association,
566. Impartial redintegration, 569. Ordinary or mixed associa
tion, 571. The law of interest, 572. Association by similarity,
578. Elementary expression of the difference between the three
kinds of association, 581. Association in voluntary thought, 583.
Similarity no elementary law, 590. History of the doctrine of
association, 594.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PERCEPTION OF TIME, 605

The sensible present, 606. Its duration is the primitive time-
perception, 608. Accuracy of our estimate of short durations,
611. We have no sense for empty time, 619. Variations of our
time-estimate, 624. The feeling of past time is a present feeling,
627. Its cerebral process, 632.

CHAPTER XVI.
MEMORY, 643

Primary memory, 643. Analysis of the phenomenon of mem
ory, 648. Retention and reproduction are both caused by paths
of association in the brain, 653. The conditions of goodness in
memory, 659. Native retentiveness is unchangeable, 663. All im
provement of memory consists in better thinking, 667. Other con
ditions of good memory, 669. Recognition, or the sense of famil
iarity, 673. Exact measurements of memory, 676. Forgetting,
679. Pathological cases, 681. Professor Ladd criticised, 687.

PSYCHOLOGY.

CHAPTEK I.

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY.

PSYCHOLOGY is the Science of Mental Life, both of its
phenomena and of their conditions. The phenomena are
such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reason
ings, decisions, and the like ; and, superficially considered,
their variety and complexity is such as to leave a chaotic
impression on the observer. The most natural and con
sequently the earliest way of unifying the material was,
first, to classify it as well as might be, and, secondly, to
affiliate the diverse mental mod&d thus found, upon a
simple entity, the personal Soul, of which they are taken
to be so many facultative manifestations. Now, for in
stance, the Soul manifests its faculty of Memory, now of
Keasoning, now of Volition, or again its Imagination or its
Appetite. This is the orthodox ' spiritualistic ' theory of
scholasticism and of common-sense. Another and a less
obvious way of unifying the chaos is to seek common ele
ments in the divers mental facts rather than a common
agent behind them, and to explain them constructively by
the various forms of arrangement of these elements, as one
explains houses by stones aad bricks. The ' association-
ist' schools of Herbart in Germany, and of Hume the
Mills and Bain in Britain have thus constructed a psychology
ivithout a soid by taking discrete 'ideas,' faint or vivid,
and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms

2 PSYCHOLOGY.

of succession, such tilings as reminiscences, perceptions,
emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other
furnishings of an individual's mind may be engendered.
The very Self or ego of the individual comes in this
way to be viewed no longer as the pre-existing source of
the representations, but rather as their last and most com
plicated fruit.

Now, if we strive rigorously to simplify the phenomena
in either of these ways, we soon become aware of inade
quacies in our method. Any particular cognition, for ex
ample, or recollection, is accounted for on the soul-theory
by being referred to the spiritual faculties of Cognition
or of Memory. These faculties themselves are thought
of as absolute properties of the soul ; that is, to take
the case of memory, no reason is given why we should
remember a fact as it happened, except that so to re
member it constitutes the essence of our Kecollective
Power. We may, as spiritualists, try to explain our mem
ory's failures and blunders by secondary causes. But
its successes can invoke no factors save the existence of
certain objective things to be remembered on the one
hand, and of our faculty of memory on the other. When,
for instance, I recall my graduation-day, and drag all its
incidents and emotions up from death's dateless night, no
mechanical cause can explain this process, nor can any
analysis reduce it to lower terms or make its nature seem
other than an ultimate datum, which, whether we rebel 01
not at its mysteriousness, must simply be taken for granted
if we are to psychologize at all. However the associationist
may represent the present ideas as thronging and arranging
themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to
admit that something, be it brain, be it 'ideas,' be it « asso
ciation/ knoics past time as past, and fills it out with this
or that event. And when the spiritualist calls memory an
'irreducible faculty,' he says no more than this admission
of the associationist already grants.

And yet the admission is far from being a satisfactory
simplification of the concrete facts. For why should this
absolute god-given Faculty retain so much better the events
of yesterday than those of last year, and, best of all, those

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 3

of an hour ago ? Why, again, in old age should its grasp
of childhood's events seem firmest ? Why should illness
and exhaustion enfeeble it ? Why should repeating an ex
perience strengthen our recollection of it ? Why should
drugs, fevers, asphyxia, and excitement resuscitate things
long since forgotten ? If we content ourselves with merely
affirming that the faculty of memory is so peculiarly con
stituted by nature as to exhibit just these oddities, we seem
little the better for having invoked it, for our explanation \
becomes as complicated as that of the crude facts with which
we started. Moreover there is something grotesque and
irrational in the supposition that the soul is equipped witl
elementary powers of such an ingeniously intricate sort
Why should our memory cling more easily to the near than
the remote ? Why should it lose its grasp of proper sooner
than of abstract names ? Such peculiarities seem quite fan
tastic ; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the
precise opposites of what they are. Evidently, then, the
faculty does not exist absolutely, but ivorks under conditions ;
and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist's
most interesting task.

However firmly he may hold to the soul and her re
membering faculty, he must acknowledge that she never
exerts the latter without a cue, and that something must al
ways precede and remind us of whatever we are to recollect
" An idea /" says the associationist, " an idea associated with
the remembered thing ; and this explains also why things
repeatedly met with are more easily recollected, for their as'
sociates on the various occasions furnish so many distinct
avenues of recall." But this does not explain the effects of
fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like. And
in general, the pure associationist's account of our mental
life is almost as bewildering as that of the pure spiritualist.
This multitude of ideas, existing absolutely, jet clinging
together, and weaving an endless carpet of themselves, like
dominoes in ceaseless change, or the bits of glass in a
kaleidoscope, — whence do they get their fantastic laws of
clinging, and why do they cling in just the shapes they dc ?

For this the associationist must introduce the order of
experience in the outer world. The dance of the ideas is

4 PSYCHOLOGY.

a copy, somewhat mutilated and altered, of the order of
j phenomena. But the slightest reflection shows that phe
nomena have absolutely no power to influence our ideas
until they have first impressed our senses and our brain.
- The bare existence of a past fact is no ground for our re
membering it. Unless we have seen it, or somehow under
gone it, we shall never know of its having been. The expe-
Ariences of the body are thus one of the conditions of the
llfaculty of memory being what it is. And a very small
amount of reflection on facts shows that one part of_ the
body, namely, the brain, is the part whose experiences are
directly concerned. If the nervous communication be cut
off between the brain and other parts, the experiences of
those other parts are non-existent for the mind. The eye j
is blind, the ear deaf, the hand insensible and motionless. '
And conversely, if the brain be injured, consciousness is
abolished or altered, even although every other organ in
the body be ready to play its normal part. A blow on the
head, a sudden subtraction of blood, the pressure of an
apoplectic hemorrhage, may have the first effect; whilst a
very few ounces of alcohol or grains of opium or hasheesh,
or a whiff of chloroform or nitrous oxide gas, are sure to
have the second. The delirium of fever, the altered self
of insanity, are all due to foreign matters circulating
through the brain, or to pathological changes in that
organ's substance. The fact that the brain is the one
i immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is
'• indeed so universally admitted nowadays that I need
spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply
postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the
•jbook will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was
' correct.

Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly
brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those con
ditions of the mentallife of which Psychology need take
i account. The spiritualist and the associationist must both
\be 'centralists,' to the extent at least of admitting that
certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own
favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the
brain laws are a codeterminant of the result.

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 6

Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of
brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in
Psychology.*

In still another way the pyschologist is forced to be
something of a nerve-physiologist. Mental phenomena are |
not only conditioned a parteante by bodily processes; but *
they lead to them a parte post. That they lead to acts is of '
course the most familiar of truths, but I do not merely mean
acts in the sense of voluntary and deliberate muscular
performances. Mental states occasion also changes in the
calibre of blood-vessels, or alteration in the heart-beats, or
processes more subtle still, in glands and viscera. If these
are taken into account, as well as acts which follow at some
remote period because the mental state was once there, it will
be safe to lay down the general law that no mental modifica
tion ever occurs ivhich is not accompanied orfolloiued by a bodily
change. The ideas and feelings, e.g., which these present
printed characters excite in the reader's mind not only
occasion movements of his eyes and nascent movements o|
articulation in him, but will some day make him speak, 01
take sides in a discussion, or give advice, or choose a book
to read, differently from what would have been the case had ]
they never impressed his retina. Our psychology must there
fore take account not only of the conditions antecedent to
mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well.

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelli
gence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be
apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking,
buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even <
saying one's prayers, may be done when the mind is ab- I
sorbed in other things. The performances of animal
instinct seern semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-
preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelli
gent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the ani
mals' consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims.

* Of. Geo. T. Ladd : Elements of Physiological Psychology (1887), pt
m, chap, in, §§ 9, 12.

6 PSYCHOLOGY.

Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as
these be included in Psychology ?

The boundary- line of the mental is certainly vague. It
is better not to be pedantic, but to let the science be as
vague as its subject, and include such phenomena as these
if by so doing we can throw any light on the main business
in hand. It will ere long be seen, I trust, that we can ;
and that we gain much more by a broad than by a narrow
conception of our subject. At a certain stage in the devel
opment of every science a degree of vagueness is what
best consists with fertility. On the whole, few recent for
mulas have done more real service of a rough sort in psy
chology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental
life and of bodily life are one, namely, ' the adjustment of
inner to outer relations.' Such a formula is vagueness
incarnate; but because it takes into account the fact that
minds inhabit environments which act on them and on
which they in turn react ; because, in short, it takes mind
in the midst of all its concrete relations, it is immensely
more fertile than the old-fashioned ' rational psychology,'
j which treated the soul as a detached existent, sufficient
* unto itself, and assumed to consider only its nature and
properties. I shall therefore feel free to make any sallies
into zoology or into pure nerve-physiology which may
seem instructive for our purposes, but otherwise shall leave
those sciences to the physiologists.

Can we state more distinctly still the manner in which
the mental life seems to intervene between impressions
made from without upon the body, and reactions of the
body upon the outer world again ? Let us look at a few
facts.

If some iron filings be sprinkled on a table and a mag
net brought near them, they will fly through the air for a
certain distance and stick to its surface. A savage see
ing the phenomenon explains it as the result of an attrac
tion or love between the magnet and the filings. But
let a card cover the poles of the magnet, and the filings
will press forever against its surface without its ever oc
curring to them to pass around its sides and thus come into

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 7

more direct contact with the object of their love. Blo~w
bubbles through a tube into the bottom of a pail of water,
they will rise to the surface and mingle with the air. Their
action may again be poetically interpreted as due to a
longing to reccmbine with the mother-atmosphere above
the surface. But if you invert a jar full of water over the
pail, they will rise and remain lodged beneath its bottom,
shut in from the outer air, although a slight deflection
from their course at the outset, or a re-descent towards the
rim of the jar when they found their upward course im
peded, would easily have set them free.

If now we pass from such actions as these to those of
living things, we notice a striking difference. Romeo wants
Juliet as the filings want the magnet ; and if no obstacles
intervene he moves towards her by as straight a line as
they. But Borneo and Juliet, if a wall be built between
them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against
its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the
card. Borneo soon finds a circuitous way, by scaling the
wall or otherwise, of touching Juliet's lips directly. With
the filings the path is fixed; whether it reaches the end
depends on accidents. With the lover it is the end which
is fixed, the path may be modified indefinitely.

Suppose a living frog in the position in which we placed
our bubbles of air, namely, at the bottom of a jar of water.
The want jf breath will soon make him also long to rejoin
the mother-atmosphere, and he will take the shortest path
to his end by swimming straight upwards. But if a jar
full of water be inverted over him, he will not, like the •
bubbles, perpetually press his nose against its unyielding
roof, but will restlessly explore the neighborhood until
by re-descending again he has discovered a path round its
brim to the goal of his desires. Again the fixed end, the
varying means !

Such contrasts between living and inanimate perform
ances end by leading men to deny that in the physical
world final purposes exist at all. Loves and desires are
to-day no longer imputed to particles of iron or of air.
No one supposes now that the end of any activity which
they may display is an ideal purpose presiding over the

8 PSYCHOLOGY.

activity from its outset and soliciting or drawing it into
being by a sort of vis afronte. The end, on the contrary, is
deemed a mere passive result, pushed into being a tergo,
having had, so to speak, no voice in its own production.
Alter the pre-existing conditions, and with inorganic ma
terials you bring forth each time a different apparent end.
But with intelligent agents, altering the conditions changes
the activity displayed, but not the end reached ; for here
the idea of the yet unrealized end co-operates with the con
ditions to determine what the activities shall be.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means f of
their attainment arq thus the mark and criterion of the presence
of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to dis
criminate between an intelligent and a mechanical per
formance. Wo impute no mentality to sticks and stones,
because they never seem to move for the sake of anything,
but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no
sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.

Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all
philosophic problems : Is the Kosmos an expression of
intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute ex-
] ternal fact pure and simple ? If we find ourselves, in con-
templating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a
realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of some
thing, we place intelligence at the heart of it and have a
religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable
flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere
mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no
reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have
carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by
lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in
the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test
has always been applied : Is the character of the actions
such that we must believe them to be performed/or the sake
of their result ? The result in question, as we shall here
after abundantly see, is as a rule a useful one,— the animal
is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing
it forth. So far the action has a teleological character;

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHO LOOT. 9

but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the
blind result of vis a tergo. The growth and movements of
plants, the processes of development, digestion, secretion,
etc., in animals, supply innumerable instances of per
formances useful to the individual which may nevertheless
be, and by most of us are supposed to be, produced by
automatic mechanism. The physiologist does not con
fidently assert conscious intelligence in the frog's spinal
cord until he has shown that the useful result which the
nervous machinery brings forth under a given irritation
remains the same when the machinery is altered. If, to take
the stock instance, the right knee of a headless frog be irri
tated with acid, the right foot will wipe it off. "When, how
ever, this foot is amputated, the animal will often raise the j /
left foot to the spot and wipe the offending material away.

Pfliiger and Lewes reason from such facts in the follow
ing way : If the first reaction were the result of mere machin
ery, they say ; if that irritated portion of the skin discharged
the right leg as a trigger discharges its own barrel of a shot
gun ; then amputating the right foot would indeed frustrate
the wiping, but would not make the left leg move. It would
simply result in the right stump moving through the empty
air (which is in fact the phenomenon sometimes observed).
The right trigger makes no effort to discharge the left barrel
if the right one be unloaded ; nor does an electrical ma
chine ever get restless because it can only emit sparks,
and not hem pillow-cases like a sewing-machine.

If, on the contrary, the right leg originally moved for the
purpose of wiping the acid, then nothing is more natural
than that, when the easiest means of effecting that purpose
prove fruitless, other means should be tried. Every failure
must keep the animal in a state of disappointment which
will lead to all sorts of new trials and devices ; and tran
quillity will not ensue till one of these, by a happy stroke,
achieves the wished-for end.

In a similar way Goltz ascribes intelligence to the
frog's optic lobes and cerebellum. We alluded above to the
manner in which a sound frog imprisoned in water will dis
cover an outlet to the atmosphere. Goltz found that frogs
deprived of their cerebral hemispheres would often exhibit

10 PSYCHOLOGY.

a like ingenuity. Such a frog, after rising from the bottom
and finding his farther upward progress checked by the
glass bell which has been inverted over him, will not per
sist in butting his nose against the obstacle until dead of
suffocation, but will often re-descend and emerge from under
its rim as if, not a definite mechanical propulsion upwards,
but rather a conscious desire to reach the air by hook or
crook were the main-spring of his activity. Goltz con
cluded from this that the hemispheres are not the sole seat
of intellect in frogs. He made the same inference from
observing that a brainless frog will turn over from his back
to his belly when one of his legs is sewed up, although the
movements required are then very different from those
excited under normal circumstances by the same annoying
position. They seem determined, consequently, not merely
by the antecedent irritant, but by the final end, — though the
irritant of course is what makes the end desired.

Another brilliant German author, Liebmann,* argues
against the brain's mechanism accounting for mental action,
by very similar considerations. A machine as such, he
says, will bring forth right results when it is in good order,
and wrong results if out of repair. But both kinds of result
flow with equally fatal necessity from their conditions. We
cannot suppose the clock-work whose structure fatally
determines it to a certain rate of speed, noticing that this
speed is too slow or too fast and vainly trying to correct it.
Its conscience, if it have any, should be as good as that of
the best chronometer, for both alike obey equally well the
y same eternal mechanical laws — laws from behind. But if
the brain be out of order and the man says " Twice four are
two," instead of " Twice four are eight," or else " I must go
to the coal to buy the wharf," instead of " I must go to the
wharf to buy the coal," instantly there arises a conscious-
I ness of error. The wrong performance, though it obey the
same mechanical law as the right, is nevertheless con
demned,— condemned as contradicting the inner law—the
law from in front, the purpose or ideal for which the brain
should act, whether it do so or not.

* Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, p. 489.

THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLOGY. 11

We need not discuss here whether these writers in draw
ing their conclusion have done justice to all the premises
involved in the cases they treat of. We quote their argu
ments only to show how they appeal to the principle that /
no actions but such as are done for an end, and shoiv a choice of /y
means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.

I shall then adopt this as the criterion by which to cir
cumscribe the subject-matter of this work so far as action \
enters into it. Many nervous performances will therefore
be unmentioned, as being purely physiological. Nor will the
anatomy of the nervous system and organs of sense be
described anew. The reader will find in H. N. Martin's
* Human Body,' in G. T. Ladd's ' Physiological Psychol
ogy,' and in all the other standard Anatomies and Physi
ologies, a mass of information which we must regard as pre
liminary and take for granted in the present work.* Of
the functions of the cerebral hemispheres, however, since i
they directly subserve consciousness, it will be well to j
give some little account.

* Nothing is easier than to familiarize one's self with the mammalian
brain. Get a sheep's head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all
three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel its
parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden's 'Manual
of Anatomy,' or by the specific directions ad Iwc given in such books as
Foster and Langley's 'Practical Physiology' (Macmillan) or Morrell's
'Comparative Anatomy and Dissection of Mammalia' (Longmans).

CHAPTER II.
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

IF I begin chopping the foot of a tree, its branches are
unmoved by my act, and its leaves murmur as peacefully as
ever in the wind. If, on the contrary, I do violence to the
foot of a fellow-man, the rest of his body instantly responds
to the aggression by movements of alarm or defence. The
reason of this difference is that the man has a nervous system
whilst the tree has none ; and the function of the nervous
system is to bring each part into harmonious co-operation
with every other. The afferent nerves, when excited by
some physical irritant, be this as gross in its mode of oper
ation as a chopping axe or as subtle as the waves of light,
conveys the excitement to the nervous centres. The com
motion set up in the centres does not stop there, but dis
charges itself, if at all strong, through the efferent nerves
into muscles and glands, exciting movements of the limbs
and viscera, or acts of secretion, which vary with the animal,
and with the irritant applied. These acts of response have
usually the common character of being of service. They
ward off the noxious stimulus and support the beneficial
one ; whilst if, in itself indifferent, the stimulus be a sign of
some distant circumstance of practical importance, the
animal's acts are addressed to this circumstance so as to
avoid its perils or secure its benefits, as the case may be.
To take a common example, if I hear the conductor calling
' All aboard ! ' as I enter the depot, my heart first stops,
then palpitates, and my legs respond to the air-waves
falling on my tympanum by quickening their movements.
If I stumble as I run, the sensation of falling provokes a
movement of the hands towards the direction of the fall,
the effect of which is to shield the body from too sudden a
shock. If a cinder enter my eye, its lids close forcibly
and a copious flow of tears tends to wash it out.

12

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 13

These three responses to a sensational stimulus differ,
however, in many respects. The closure of the eye and the
lachrymation are quite involuntary, and so is the disturbance
of the heart. Such involuntary responses we know as
' reflex ' acts. The motion of the arms to break the shock
of falling may also be called reflex, since it occurs too
quickly to be deliberately intended. Whether it be instinc
tive or whether it result from the pedestrian education of
childhood may be doubtful ; it is, at any rate, less automatic
than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort
learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it alto
gether. Actions of this kind, into which instinct and volition
enter upon equal terms, have been called ' semi-reflex.' The
act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no
instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of edu
cation, and is preceded by a consciousness of the purpose to
be attained and a distinct mandate of the will. It is a ' vol
untary act.' Thus the animal's reflex and voluntary per
formances shade into each other gradually, being connected
by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also
be modified by conscious intelligence.

An outside observer, unable to perceive the accompany
ing consciousness, might be wholly at a loss to discriminate
between the automatic acts and those which volition es
corted. But if the criterion of mind's existence be the
choice of the proper means for the attainment of a supposed
end, all the acts seem to be inspired by intelligence, for
appropriateness characterizes them all alike. This fact, now,
has led to two quite opposite theories about the relation to
consciousness of the nervous functions. Some authors,
finding that the higher voluntary ones seem to require the
guidance of feeling, conclude that over the lowest reflexes
some such feeling also presides, though it may be a feeling
of which tve remain unconscious. Others, finding that reflex
and semi-automatic acts may, notwithstanding their appro
priateness, take place with an unconsciousness apparently
complete, fly to the opposite extreme and maintain that the
appropriateness even of voluntary actions owes nothing to
the fact that consciousness attends them. They are, accord
ing to these writers, results oi' physiological mechanism pure

14 PSYCHOLOGY.

and simple. In a near chapter we shall return to this
controversy again. Let us now look a little more closely
at the brain and at the ways in which its states may be sup
posed to condition those of the mind.

THE PROG'S NERVE-CENTRES.

Both the minute anatomy and the detailed physiology
of the brain are achievements of the present generation, or
rather we may say (beginning with Meynert) of the past
twenty years. Many points are still obscure and subject
to controversy ; but a general way of conceiving the organ
has been reached on all hands which in its main feature
seems not unlikely to stand, and which even gives a most
plausible scheme of the way in which cerebral and mental
operations go hand in hand.

The best way to enter the subject will be to take a lower
creature, like a frog, and study by the vivisectional method
the functions of his different nerve-centres. The frog's
nerve-centres are figured in the accompany
ing diagram, which needs no further ex
planation. I will first proceed to state
what happens when various amounts of
the anterior parts are removed, in different
frogs, in the way in which an ordinary
~ * student removes them ; that is, with no ex
treme precautions as to the purity of the
operation. We shall in this way reach a
very simple conception of the functions of
the various centres, involving the strongest
possible contrast between the cerebral
FIO. \.—c H, cerebral hemispheres and the lower lobes. This

Hemispheres; O Th, , . .,, , T i i • j

Optic fhaiaini; o L, sharp conception will have didactic ad-

Optic Lobes; C6, „ ., . „, , ,•

Cerebellum ; M o, vantages, lor it is olten very instructive

Medulla Oblonjrata; . .,, • i <• i j

s c, spinal Cord, to start with too simple a iormula and
correct it later on. Our first formula, as we shall later
see, will have to be softened down somewhat by the results
of more careful experimentation both on frogs and birds,
and by those of the most recent observations on dogs,

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 15

monkeys, and man. But it will put us, from the outset, in
clear possession of some fundamental notions and distinc
tions which we could otherwise not gain so well, and none
of which the later more completed view will overturn.

If, then, we reduce the frog's nervous system to the
spinal cord alone, by making a section behind the base of
the skull, between the spinal cord and the medulla oblon-
gata, thereby cutting off the brain from all connection with
the rest of the body, the frog will still continue to live, but
with a very peculiarly modified activity. It ceases to breathe
or swallow ; it lies flat on its belly, and does not, like a
normal frog, sit up on its fore paws, though its hind legs are
kept, as usual, folded against its body and immediately re
sume this position if drawn out. If thrown on its back, it
lies there quietly, without turning over like a normal frog.
Locomotion and voice seem entirely abolished. If we sus
pend it by the nose, and irritate different portions of its
skin by acid, it performs a set of remarkable ' defensive '
movements calculated to wipe away the irritant. Thus, if
the breast be touched, both fore paws will rub it vigorously;
if we touch the outer side of the elbow, the hind foot of the
same side will rise directly to the spot and wipe it. The
back of the foot will rub the knee if that be attacked, whilst
if the foot be cut away, the stump will make ineffectual
movements, and then, in many frogs, a pause will come, as
if for deliberation, succeeded by a rapid passage of the
opposite unmutilated foot to the acidulated spot.

The most striking character of all these movements,
after their teleological appropriateness, is their precision.
They vary, in sensitive frogs and with a proper amount of
irritation, so little as almost to resemble in their machine-
like regularity the performances of a jumping-jack, whose
legs must twitch whenever you pull the string. The spinal
cord of the frog thus contains arrangements of cells and
fibres fitted to convert skin irritations into movements of
defence. We may call it the centre for defensive movements
in this animal. We may indeed go farther than this, and
by cutting the spinal cord in various places find that its
separate segments are independent mechanisms, for appro
priate activities of the head and of the arms and legs respec-

16 PSYCHOLOGY.

tively. The segment governing the arms is especially
active, in male frogs, in the breeding season; and these mem
bers alone with the breast and back appertaining to them,
everything else being cut away, will then actively grasp a
finger placed between them and remain hanging to it for a
considerable time.

The spinal cord in other animals has analogous powers.
Even in man it makes movements of defence. Paraplegics
draw up their legs when tickled ; and Eobin, on tickling
the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the
arm and hand move towards the spot. Of the lower func
tions of the mammalian cord, studied so ably by Goltz and
others, this is not the place to speak.

If, in a second animal, the cut be made just behind the
optic lobes so that the cerebellum and medulla oblongata
remain attached to the cord, then swallowing, breathing,
crawling, and a rather enfeebled jumping and swimming
are added to the movements previously observed.* There
are other reflexes too. The animal, thrown on his back,
immediately turns over to his belly. Placed in a shallow
bowl, which is floated on water and made to rotate, he re
sponds to the rotation by first turning his head and then
waltzing around with his entire body, in the opposite direc
tion to the whirling of the bowl. If his support be tilted so
that his head points downwards, he points it up ; he points
it down if it be pointed upwards, to the right if it be
pointed to the left, etc. But his reactions do not go
iarther than these movements of the head. He will not
like frogs whose thalami are preserved, climb up a board
if the latter be tilted, but will slide off it to the ground

If the cut be made on another frog between the'tha-

lami and the optic lobes, the locomotion both on land

and water becomes quite normal, and, in addition to the

lexes already shown by the lower centres, he croaks

regularly whenever he is pinched under the arms He

compensates rotations, etc., by movements of the head, and

irns over from his back; but still drops off his tilted

' .

be said that this particular cut commonlv proves fatal The
he rare cases which survive.

THE FUNCTIONS OF TUB BRAIN. 17

board. As his optic nerves are destroyed by the usual
operation, it is impossible to say whether he will avoid
obstacles placed in his path.

When, finally, a frog's cerebral hemispheres alone are cut
off by a section between them and the thalami which pre
serves the latter, an unpractised observer would not at first
suspect anything abnormal about the animal. Not only is
he capable, on proper instigation, of all the acts already
described, but he guides himself by sight, so that if an
obstacle be set up between him and the light, and he be
forced to move forward, he either jumps over it or swerves
to one side. He manifests sexual passion at the proper
season, and, unlike an altogether brainless frog, which em
braces anything placed between his arms, postpones this
reflex act until a female of his own species is provided.
Thus far, as aforesaid, a person unfamiliar with frogs
might not suspect a mutilation ; but even such a person
would soon remark the almost entire absence of spontane
ous motion — that is, motion unprovoked by any present in-
citation of sense. The continued movements of swimming,
performed by the creature in the water, seem to be the
fatal result of the contact of that fluid with its skin. They
cease when a stick, for example, touches his hands. This
is a sensible irritant towards which the feet are automatic
ally drawn by reflex action, and on which the animal re
mains sitting. He manifests no hunger, and will suffer a
fly to crawl over his nose unsnapped at. Fear, too, seems
to have deserted him. In a word, he is an extremely com
plex machine whose actions, so far as they go, tend to
self-preservation ; but still a machine, in this sense — that it
seems to contain no incalculable element. By applying
the right sensory stimulus to him we are almost as certain
of getting a fixed response as an organist is of hearing a
certain tone when he pulls out a certain stop.

But now if to the lower centres we add the cerebral
hemispheres, or if, in other words, we make an intact ani
mal the subject of our observations, all this is changed. In
addition to the previous responses to present incitements
of sense, our frog now goes through long and complex acts
of locomotion spontaneously, or as if moved by what in our-

18 PSYCHOLOGY.

selves we should call an idea. His reactions to outward
stimuli vary their form, too. Instead of making simple
defensive movements with his hind legs like a headless
frog if touched, or of giving one or two leaps and then sit
ting still like a hemisphereless one, he makes persistent
and varied efforts at escape, as if, not the mere contact of
the physiologist's hand, but the notion of danger suggested
by it were now his spur. Led by the feeling of hunger,
too, he goes in search of insects, fish, or smaller frogs, and
varies his procedure with each species of victim. The
physiologist cannot by manipulating him elicit croaking,
crawling up a board, swimming or stopping, at will. His
conduct has become incalculable. We can no longer foretell
it exactly. Effort to escape is his dominant reaction, but
he may do anything else, even swell up and become per
fectly passive in our hands.

Such are the phenomena commonly observed, and such
the impressions which one naturally receives. Certain
general conclusions follow irresistibly. First of all the
following :

The acts of all the centres involve the use of the same
muscles. When a headless frog's hind leg wipes the acid, he
calls into play all the leg-muscles which a frog with his
full medulla oblongata and cerebellum uses when he turns
from his back to his belly. Their contractions are, how
ever, combined differently in the two cases, so that the re
sults vary widely. We must consequently conclude that
specific arrangements of cells and fibres exist in the
cord for wiping, in the medulla for turning over, etc.
Similarly they exist in the thalami for jumping over
seen obstacles and for balancing the moved body ; in the
optic lobes for creeping backwards, or what not. But in
the hemispheres, since the presence of these organs brings
no new elementary form of movement with it, but only deter
mines differently the occasions on which the movements shall
occur, making the usual stimuli less fatal and machine-like ;
we need suppose no such machinery directly co-ordinative
of muscular contractions to exist. We may rather assume,
when the mandate for a wiping-movement is sent forth by

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 19

the hemispheres, that a current goes straight to the wiping-
arrangernent in the spinal cord, exciting this arrangement
as a whole. Similarly, if an intact frog wishes to jump
over a stone which he sees, all he need do is to excite from
the hemispheres the jumping-centre in the thalami or
wherever it may be, and the latter will provide for the de
tails of the execution. It is like a general ordering a
colonel to make a certain movement, but not telling him
how it shall be done.*

The same muscle, then, is repeatedly represented at different
heights; and at each it enters into a different combination
with other muscles to co-operate in some special form of
concerted movement. At each height the movement is dis
charged by some particular form of sensorial stimulus. Thus
in the cord, the skin alone occasions movements ; in the
upper part of the optic lobes, the eyes are added ; in the
thalami, the semi-circular canals would seem to play a part ;
whilst the stimuli which discharge the hemispheres would
seem not so much to be elementary sorts of sensation, as
groups ot sensations forming determinate objects or things.
Prey is not pursued nor are enemies shunned by ordinary
hemisphereless frogs. Those reactions upon complex cir
cumstances which we call instinctive rather than reflex, are
already in this animal dependent on the brain's highest
lobes, and still more is this the case with animals higher
in the zoological scale.

The results are just the same if, instead of a frog, we
take a pigeon, and cut out his hemispheres as they are ordi
narily cut out for a lecture-room demonstration. There is
not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird
cannot perform if expressly excited thereto ; only the inner
promptings seem deficient, and when left to himself he
spends most of his time crouched on the ground with his
head sunk between his shoulders as if asleep.

* I confine myself to the frog for simplicity's sake. In higher animals,
especially the ape and man, it would seem as if not only determinate com
binations of muscles, but limited groups or even single muscles could be
innervated from the hemispheres.

20 PSYCHOLOGY.

GENERAL NOTION OF HEMISPHERES.

All these facts lead us, when we think about them, to
some such explanatory conception as this : The lower centres
'act from present sensational stimuli alone; the hemispheres act
from perceptions and considerations, the sensations which they
may receive serving only as suggesters of these. But what
are perceptions but sensations grouped together ? and what
are considerations but expectations, in the fancy, of sensa
tions which will be felt one way or another according as
action takes this course or that ? If I step aside on seeing
a rattlesnake, from considering how dangerous an animal
he is, the mental materials which constitute my prudential
reflection are images more or less vivid of the movement
of his head, of a sudden pain in my leg, of a state of terror,
a swelling of the limb, a chill, delirium, unconsciousness,
etc., etc., and the ruin of my hopes. But all these images
are constructed out of my past experiences. They are repro
ductions of what I have felt or witnessed. They are, in
short, remote sensations ; and the difference between the hemi-
sphereless animal and the whole one may be concisely ex
pressed by saying that the one obeys absent, the other only
present, objects.

The hemispheres would then seem to be the seat of mem
ory. Vestiges of past experience must in some way be
stored up in them, and must, when aroused by present
stimuli, first appear as representations of distant goods
and evils; and then must discharge into the appropriate
motor channels for warding off the evil and securing the
benefits of the good. If we liken the nervous currents to
electric currents, we can compare the nervous system, (7,
below the hemispheres to a direct circuit from sense-
organ to muscle along the line S...C...Moi Fig. 2 (p. 21).
The hemisphere, H, adds the long circuit or loop-line
through which the current may pass when for any reason
the direct line is not used.

Thus, a tired wayfarer on a hot day throws himself on

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 21

the damp eartli beneath a maple-tree. The sensations of
delicious rest and coolness pour
ing themselves through the direct
line would naturally discharge into
the muscles of complete exten
sion: he would abandon himself
to the dangerous repose. But the
loop-line being open, part of the
current is drafted along it, and
awakens rheumatic or catarrlial
reminiscences, which prevail over
the instigations of sense, and make FlQ*

the man arise and pursue his way to where he may enjoy his
rest more safely. Presently we shall examine the manner
in which the hemispheric loop-line may be supposed to
serve as a reservoir for such reminiscences as these. Mean
while I will ask the reader to notice some corollaries of its
being such a reservoir.

First, no animal without it can deliberate, pause, post
pone, nicely weigh one motive against another, or compare.
Prudence, in a word, is for such a creature an impossible
virtue. Accordingly we see that nature removes those func
tions in the exercise of which prudence is a virtue from the
lower centres and hands them over to the cerebrum. Wher
ever a creature has to deal with complex features of the en
vironment, prudence is a virtue. The higheJ animals have so
to deal ; and the more complex the features, the higher we
call the animals. The fewer of his acts, i/ien, can such an
animal perform without the help of the organs in question.
In the frog many acts devolve wholly on the lower centres;
in the bird fewer; in the rodent fewer still ; in the dog very
few indeed ; and in apes and men hardly any at all.

The advantages of this are obvious. Take the prehen--
sion of food as an example and suppose it to be a reflex
performance of the lower centres. The animal will be con
demned fatally and irresistibly to snap at it whenever
presented, no matter what the circumstances may be ;
he can no more disobey this prompting than water can
refuse to boil when a fire is kindled under the poi His
life will again and again pay the forfeit of his gluttony.

22 PSyCHOLOGY.

Exposure to retaliation, to other enemies, to traps, to
poisons, to the dangers of repletion, must be regular
parts of his existence. His lack of all thought by which to
weigh the danger against the attractive-ness of the bait, and
of all volition to remain hungry a little while longer,
is the direct measure of his lowness in the mental scale.
And those fishes which, like our cunners and sculpins,
are no sooner thrown back from the hook into the water,
than they automatically seize the hook again, would soon
expiate the degradation of their intelligence by the extinc
tion of their type, did not their exaggerated fecundity atone
for their imprudence. Appetite and the acts it prompts
have consequently become in all higher vertebrates func
tions of the cerebrum. They disappear when the physiol
ogist's knife nas left the subordinate centres alone in "place.
The brainless pigeon will starve though left on a corn-
heap.

Take again the sexual function. In birds this devolves
exclusively upon the hemispheres. When these are shorn
away the pigeon pays no attention to the billings and coo-
ings of its mate. And Goltz found that a bitch in heat
would excite no emotion in male dogs who had suffered
large loss of cerebral tissue. Those who have read Dar
win's ' Descent of Man' know what immense importance in
the amelioration of the breed in birds this author ascribes
to the mere fact of sexual selection. The sexual act is not
performed until every condition of circumstance and senti
ment is fulfilled, until time, place, and partner all are fit.
But in frogs and toads this passion devolves on the lower
centres. They show consequently a machine-like obe
dience to the present incitement of sense, and an almost
total exclusion of the power of choice. Copulation occurs
per fas aut nefas, occasionally between males, often with
dead females, in puddles exposed on the highway, and
the male may be cut in two without letting go his hold.
Every spring an immense sacrifice of batrachian life takes
place from these causes alone.

No one need be told how dependent all human social
elevation is upon the prevalence of chastity. Hardly any
factor measures more than this the difference between civili*

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 23

zation and barbarism. Physiologically interpreted, chastity
means nothing more than the fact that present solicitations
of sense are overpowered by suggestions of aesthetic and
moral fitness which the circumstances awaken in the
cerebrum ; and that upon the inhibitory or permissive in
fluence of these alone action directly depends.

Within the psychic life due to the cerebrum itself the
same general distinction obtains, between considerations of
the more immediate and considerations of the more remote.
In all ages the man whose determinations are swayed by
reference to the most distant ends has been held to possess
the highest intelligence. The tramp who lives from hour
to hour ; the bohemian whose engagements are from day
to day ; the bachelor who builds but for a single life ;
the father who acts for another generation ; the patriot
who thinks of a whole community and many generations ;
and finally, the philosopher and saint whose cares are for
humanity and for eternity, — these range themselves in an
unbroken hierarchy, wherein each successive grade results
from an increased manifestation of the special form of
action by which the cerebral centres are distinguished
fyorn all below them.

In the ' loop-line ' along which the memories and ideas
of the distant are supposed to lie, the action, so far as it is
a physical process, must be interpreted after the type of the
action in the lower centres. If regarded here as a reflex
process, it must be reflex there as well. The current in
both places runs out into the muscles only after it has first
run in ; but whilst the path by which it runs out is deter
mined in the lower centres by reflections few and fixed
amongst the cell-arrangements, in the hemispheres the
reflections are many and instable. This, it will be seen, is
only a difference of degree and not of kind, and does not
change the reflex type. The conception of all action as
conforming to this type is the fundamental conception of
modern nerve-physiology. So much for our general pre
liminary conception of the nerve-centres ! Let us define it
more distinctly before we see how well physiological ob
servation will bear it out in detail.

24 PSYCHOLOGY.

THE EDUCATION OF THE HEMISPHERES.

Nerve-currents run in through sense-organs, and whilst
provoking reflex acts in the lower centres, they arouse ideas
in the hemispheres, which either permit the reflexes in
question, check them, or substitute others for them. All
ideas being in the last resort reminiscences, the question to
answer is : How can processes become organized in the hemi
spheres ivhich correspond to reminiscences in the mind ?*

Nothing is easier than to conceive a possible way in
which this might be done, provided four assumptions be
granted. These assumptions (which after all are inevitable
in any event) are :

1) The same cerebral process which, when aroused
from without by a sense-organ, gives the perception of an
object, will give an idea of the same object when aroused
by other cerebral processes from within.

2) If processes 1, 2, 3, 4 have once been aroused to
gether or in immediate succession, any subsequent arousal
of any one of them (whether from without or within) will
tend to arouse the others in the original order. [This is the
so-called law of association.]

3) Every sensorial excitement propagated to a lower
centre tends to spread upwards and arouse an idea.

4) Every idea tends ultimately either to produce a
movement or to check one which otherwise would be pro
duced.

Suppose now (these assumptions being granted) that we
have a baby before us who sees a candle-flame for the first

* I hope that the reader will take no umbrage at my so mixing the

\ physical and mental, and talking of reflex acts and hemispheres and remi-

' niscences in the same breath, as if they were homogeneous quantities and

factors of one causal chain. I have done so deliberately ; for although I

admit that from the radically physical point of view it is easy to conceive

of the chain of events amongst the cells and fibres as complete in itself,

I and that whilst so conceiving it one need make no mention of • ideas,'
I yet suspect that point of view of being an unreal abstraction. Reflexes
In centres may take place even where accompanying feelings or ideas guide
/ them. In another chapter I shall try to show reasons for not abandoning
this common-sense position ; meanwhile language lends itself so much
more easily to the mixed way of describing, that I will continue to employ
the latter. The more radical-minded reader can always read ' ideationa]
orocess' for 'idea.'

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

FIG. 3.

time, and, by virtue of a reflex tendency common in babies
of a certain age, extends his
hand to grasp it, so that his
fingers get burned. So far we
have two reflex currents in
play : first, from the eye to the
extension movement, along the
line 1—1—1—1 of Fig. 3 ; and
second, from the finger to the
movement of drawing back the
hand, along the line 2 — 2 — 2 — 2. ^
If this were the baby's whole
nervous system, and if the re
flexes were once for all organic,
we should have no alteration in his behavior, no matter
how often the experience recurred. The retinal image of
the flame would always make the arm shoot forward, the
burning of the finger would always send it back. But we
know that ' the burnt child dreads the fire,' and that one
experience usually protects the fingers forever. The point
is to see how the hemispheres may bring this result to pass.
We must complicate our diagram (see Fig. 4). Let
the current 1 — 1, from the eye, discharge upward as well as
downward when it reaches the lower centre for vision, and
arouse the perceptional process sl in the hemispheres ; let

the feeling of the arm's exten
sion also send up a current
which leaves a trace of itself,
in1 ; let tli3 burnt finger leave
an analogous trace, sa ; and
let the movement of retrac
tion leave m2. These four
processes will now, by virtue
of assumption 2), be associ
ated together by the path
6-1 — ra1— s2 — m2 , running from

+l,a fivc-f fn fLa Incf GO -fTmf if
tne first tO tlie last» SO ttiat "

anything touches off s1, ideas
of the extension, of the burnt
finger, and of the retraction will pass in rapid succession

FIG. 4.— The dotted lines stand for affer-
ent paths, the broken lines for paths

for effe"eutepathtses; the entlre lilies

26 PSYCHOLOGY.

through the mind. The effect on the child's conduct when
the candle-flame is next presented is easy to imagine. Of
course the sight of it arouses the grasping reflex ; but it
arouses simultaneously the idea thereof, together with that
of the consequent pain, and of the final retraction of the
hand ; and if these cerebral processes prevail in strength
over the immediate sensation in the centres below, the last
idea will be the cue by which the final action is discharged.
The grasping will be arrested in mid-career, the hand
drawn back, and the child's fingers saved.

In all this we assume that the hemispheres do not
natively couple any particular sense-impression with any
special motor discharge. They only register, and preserve
traces of, such couplings as are already organized in the
reflex centres below. But this brings it inevitably about
that, when a chain of experiences has been already regis
tered and the first link is impressed once again from without,
the last link will often be awakened in idea long before it
can exist in fact. And if this last link were previously
coupled with a motion, that motion may now come from the
mere ideal suggestion without waiting for the actual impres
sion to arise. Thus an animal with hemispheres acts in an
ticipation of future things ; or, to use our previous formula, he
acts from considerations of distant good and ill. If we give
the name of partners to the original couplings of impressions
with motions in a reflex way, then we may say that the func
tion of the hemispheres is simply to bring about exchanges
among the partners. Movement mn , which natively is sensa
tion sn's partner, becomes through the hemispheres the
partner of sensation s1 , s2 or s3 . It is like the great corn-
mutating switch-board at a central telephone station. No
new elementary process is involved ; no impression nor any
motion peculiar to the hemispheres ; but any number of
combinations impossible to the lower machinery taken
alone, and an endless consequent increase in the possibilities
of behavior on the creature's part.

All this, as a mere scheme,* is so clear and so concordant

* I shall call it hereafter for shortness ' the Meynert scheme;' for the
child-and-flame example, as well as the whole general notion that the hemi
spheres are a supernumerary surface for the projection and association o*

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 27

with the general look of the facts as almost to impose itself
on our belief ; but it is anything but clear in detail. The
brain-physiology of late years has with great effort sought
to work out the paths by which these couplings of sensa
tions with movements take place, both in the hemispheres
and in the centres below.

So we must next test our scheme by the facts discovered
in this direction. We shall conclude, I think, after taking
them all into account, that the scheme probably makes
the lower centres too machine-like and the hemispheres
not quite machine-like enough, and must consequently be
softened down a little. So much I may say in advance.
Meanwhile, before plunging into the details which await us,
it will somewhat clear our ideas if we contrast the modern
way of looking at the matter with the phrenological concep
tion which but lately preceded it.

THE PHRENOLOGICAL CONCEPTION.

In a certain sense Gall was the first to seek to explain
in detail how the brain could subserve our mental opera
tions. His way of proceeding was only too simple. He took
the faculty-psychology as his ultimatum on the mental side,
and he made no farther psychological analysis. Wherever
he found an individual with some strongly-marked trait
of character he examined his head ; and if he found the
latter prominent in a certain region, he said without more
ado that that region was the ' organ ' of the trait or
faculty in question. The traits were of very diverse con
stitution, some being simple sensibilities like ' weight '
or ' color ; ' some being instinctive tendencies like ' alimen-
tiveness ' or ' amativeness ; ' and others, again, being com
plex resultants like 'conscientiousness,' 'individuality.'
Phrenology fell promptly into disrepute among scientific
men because observation seemed to show that large facul-

sensations and movements natively coupled in the centres below, is due to
Th. Meynert, the Austrian anatomist. For a popular account of his views,
see his pamphlet ' Zur Mechanik des Gehirnbaues,' Vienna, 1874. His
most recent development of them is embodied in his ' Psychiatry,' a
clinical treatise on diseases of the forebruiu, translated by B. Sachs, New
York, 1885.

28 PSYCHOLOGY.

ties and large ' bumps ' might fail to coexist ; because the
scheme of Gall was so vast as hardly to admit of accurate
determination at all — who of us can say even of his own
brothers whether their perceptions of weight and of time are
well developed or not ? — because the followers of Gall and
Spurzheim were unable to reform these errors in any appre
ciable degree ; and, finally, because the whole analysis of
faculties was vague and erroneous from a psychologic point
of view. Popular professors of the lore have nevertheless
continued to command the admiration of popular audiences ;
and there seems no doubt that Phrenology, however little
it satisfy our scientific curiosity about the functions of dif
ferent portions of the brain, may still be, in the hands of
intelligent practitioners, a useful help in the art of reading
character. A hooked nose and a firm jaw are usually signs
of practical energy ; soft, delicate hands are signs of refined
sensibility. Even so may a prominent eye be a sign of
power over language, and a bull-neck a sign of sensuality.
But the brain behind the eye and neck need no more be
the organ of the signified faculty than the jaw is the
organ of the will or the hand the organ of refinement.
These correlations between mind and body are, however, so
frequent that the ' characters ' given by phrenologists are
often remarkable for knowingness and insight.

Phrenology hardly does more than restate the problem.
To answer the question, "Why do I like children?" by
saying, " Because you have a large organ of philoprogeni-
tiveness," but renames the phenomenon to be explained.
What is my philoprogenitiveness ? Of what mental ele
ments does it consist ? And how can a part of the brain
be its organ? A science of the mind must reduce such
complex manifestations as ' philoprogenitiveness ' to their
dements. A science of the brain must point out the func
tions of its elements. A science cf the relations of mind
and brain must show how the elementary ingredients of the
former correspond to the elementary functions of the latter.
But phrenology, except by occasional coincidence, takes no
account of elements at all. Its « faculties,' as a rule, are
fully equipped persons in a particular mental attitude.
Take, for example, the ' faculty ' of language. It involves

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 29

in reality a host of distinct powers. We must first have
images of concrete things and ideas of abstract qualities
and relations ; we must next have the memory of words
and then the capacity so to associate each idea or image
with a particular word that, when the word is heard, the
idea shall forthwith enter our mind. We must conversely,
as soon as the idea arises in our mind, associate with it a
mental image of the word, and by means of this image we
must innervate our articulatory apparatus so as to repro
duce the word as physical sound. To read or to write a
language other elements still must be introduced. But it
is plain that the faculty of spoken language alone is so
complicated as to call into play almost all the elementary
powers which the mind possesses, memory, imagination,
association, judgment, and volition. A portion of the brain
competent to be the adequate seat of such a faculty would
needs be an entire brain in miniature, — just as the faculty
itself is really a specification of the entire man, a sort of
bomunculus.

Yet just such homunculi are for the most part the
phrenological organs. As Lange says :

" "We have a parliament of little men together, each one of whom,
as happens also in a real parliament, possesses but a single idea
which he ceaselessly strives to make prevail " — benevolence, firmness,
hope, and the rest. "Instead of one soul, phrenology gives us forty,
each alone as enigmatic as the full aggregate psychic life can be. In
stead of dividing the latter into effective elements, she divides it into
personal beings of peculiar character. . . . ' Herr Pastor, sure there
be a horse inside,' called out the peasants to X after their spiritual
shepherd had spent hours in explaining to them the construction of the
locomotive. With a horse inside truly everything becomes clear, even
though it be a queer enough sort of horse— the horse itself calls for no
explanation ! Phrenology takes a start to get beyond the point of view
of the ghost-like soul entity, but she ends by populating the whole skull
with ghosts of the same order." *

Modern Science conceives of the matter in a very differ
ent way. Brain and mind alike consist of simple elements,
sensory and motor. "All nervous centres," says Dr. Hugh-
lings Jackson,f " from the lowest to the very highest (the

*Gescnichte des Materialismus, 3d ed., n. p. 345.
f West Riding Asylum Reports, 1876, p. 267.

30 PSYCHOLOGY.

substrata of consciousness), are made up of nothing else
than nervous arrangements, representing impressions and
movements. ... I do not see of what other materials
the brain can be made." Meynert represents the matter
similarly when he calls the cortex of the hemispheres the
surface of projection for every muscle and every sensitive
point of the body. The muscles and the sensitive points
are represented each by a cortical point, and the brain is
nothing but the sum of all these cortical points, to which,
on the mental side, as many ideas correspond. Ideas of
sensation, ideas of motion are, on the other hand, the ele
mentary factors out of which the mind is built up by the
associationists in psychology. There is a complete parallel
ism between the two analyses, the same diagram of little
dots, circles, or triangles joined by lines symbolizes equally
well the cerebral and mental processes : the dots stand for
cells or ideas, the lines for fibres or associations. We shall
have later to criticise this analysis so far as it relates to
the mind ; but there is no doubt that it is a most convenient,
and has been a most useful, hypothesis, formulating the
facts in an extremely natural way.

If, then, we grant that motor and sensory ideas variously
associated are the materials of the mind, all we need do to get
a complete diagram of the mind's and the brain's relations
should be to ascertain which sensory idea corresponds to
which sensational surface of projection, and which motor
idea to which muscular surface of projection. The associa
tions would then correspond to the fibrous connections be
tween the various surfaces. This distinct cerebral localization
of the various elementary sorts of idea has been treated as
a 'postulate' by many physiologists (e.g. Munk) ; and the
most stirring controversy in nerve-physiology which the
present generation has seen has been the localization-
question.

THE LOCALIZATION OF FUNCTIONS IN THE
HEMISPHERES.

Up to 1870, the opinion which prevailed was that which
the experiments of Flourens on pigeons' brains had made
plausible, namely, that the different functions of the hemi-

FUNCTIONS OF THE BftAIN. 31

spheres were not locally separated, but carried on each by
the aid of the whole organ. Hitzig in 1870 showed, how
ever, that in a dog's brain highly specialized movements
could be produced by electric irritation of determinate
regions of the cortex ; and Ferrier and Munk, half a dozen
years later, seemed to prove, either by irritations or excis
ions or both, that there were equally determinate regions
connected with the senses of sight, touch, hearing, and
smell. Munk's special sensorial localizations, however,
disagreed with Ferrier's ; and Goltz, from his extirpation-
experiments, came to a conclusion adverse to strict local
ization of any kind. The controversy is not yet over. I
will not pretend to say anything more of it historically, but
give a brief account of the condition in which matters at
present stand.

The one thing which is perfectly well established is this,
that the ' central ' convolutions, on either side of the fissure of
Kolando, and (at least in the monkey) the calloso-marginal
convolution (which is continuous with them on the mesial
surface where one hemisphere is applied against the other),
form the region by which all the motor incitations which
leave the cortex pass out, on their way to those executive
centres in the region of the pons, medulla, and spinal cord
from which the muscular contractions are discharged in
the last resort. The existence of this so-called ' motor
zone ' is established by the lines of evidence successively
given below :

(1) Cortical Irritations. Electrical currents oi small
intensity applied to the surface of the said convolutions in
dogs, monkeys, and other animals, produce well-defined
movements in face, fore-limb, hind-limb, tail, or trunk,
according as one point or another of the surface is irritated.
These movements affect almost invariably the side opposite
to the brain irritations : If the left hemisphere be excited, the
movement i& of the right leg, side of face, etc. All the objec
tions at first raised against the validity of these experiments
have been overcome. The movements are certainly not due
to irritations of the base of the brain by the downward spread
of the current, for : a) mechanical irritations will produce
them, though less easily than electrical ; 6) shifting the

32 PSYCHOLOGY,

electrodes to a point close by on the surface changes the
movement in ways quite inexplicable by changed physical
conduction of the current ; c) if the cortical ' centre' for a
certain movement be cut under with a sharp knife but left
in situ, although the electric conductivity is physically
unaltered by the operation, the physiological conductivity
is gone and currents of the same strength no longer pro
duce the movements which they did ; d) the time-interval
between the application of the electric stimulus to the cor
tex and the resultant movement is what it would be if the
cortex acted physiologically and not merely physically in
transmitting the irritation. It is namely a well-known fact
that when a nerve-current has to pass through the spinal
cord to excite a muscle by reflex action, the time is longer
than if it passes directly down the motor nerve : the cells
of the cord take a certain time to discharge. Similarly,
when a stimulus is applied directly to the cortex the muscle
contracts two or three hundredths of a second later than it
does when the place on the cortex is cut away and the elec
trodes are applied to the white fibres below.*

(2) Cortical Ablations. "When the cortical spot which is
found to produce a movement of the fore-leg, in a dog,
is excised (see spot 5 in Fig. 5), the leg in question becomes
peculiarly affected. At first it seems paralyzed. Soon, how
ever, it is used with the other legs, but badly. The animal
does not bear his weight on it, allows it to rest on its dorsal
surface, stands with it crossing the other leg, does not remove
it if it hangs over the edge of a table, can no longer « give the
paw' at word of command if able to do so before the opera
tion, does not use it for scratching the ground, or holding a
bone as formerly, lets it slip out when running on a smooth

* For a thorough discussion of the various objections, see Ferrier's
'Functions of the Brain,' 2d ed., pp. 227-234, and Fra^ois-Franck's
' Le9ons sur les Fonctions Motrices du Cerveau ' (1887), Le?on 31. The most
minutely accurate experiments on irritation of cortical points are those
of Paneth, in Pfliiger's Archiv, vol 37, p. 528.— Recently the skull has been
fearlessly opened by surgeons, and operations upon the human brain per
formed, sometimes with the happiest results. In some of these operations
the cortex has been electrically excited for the purpose of more exactly
localizing the spot, and the movements first observed in dogs and monkeys
have then been verified in men.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 33

surface or when shaking himself, etc., etc. Sensibility of
all kinds seems diminished as well as motility, but of this I
shall speak later on. Moreover the dog tends in voluntary
movements to swerve towards the side of the brain-lesion in
stead of going straight forward. All these symptoms gradu
ally decrease, so that even with a very severe brain-lesion
the dog may be outwardly indistinguishable from a well dog
after eight or ten weeks. Still, a slight chloroformization
will reproduce the disturbances, even then. There is a cer
tain appearance of ataxic in-coordination in the movements
— the dog lifts his fore-feet high and brings them down with
more strength than usual, and yet the trouble is not ordi-

FIG. 5.— Left Hemisphere of Dog's Brain, after Ferrier. A, the fissure of Sylvius. B,
the crucial sulcus. O, the olfactory bulb. J, II, III, IV, indicate the first, second,
third, and fourth external convolutions respectively. (1), (4), and (5) are on the
sigmoid gyrus.

nary lack of co-ordination. Neither is there paralysis.
The strength of whatever movements are made is as great
as ever — dogs with extensive destruction of the motor zone
can jump as high and bite as hard as ever they did, but
they seem less easily moved to do anything with the affected
parts. Dr0 Loeb, who has studied the motor disturbances
of dogs more carefully than any one, conceives of them en
masse as effects of an increased inertia in all the processes
of innervation towards the side opposed to the lesion. All
such movements require an unwonted effort for their exe
cution ; and when only the normally usual effort is made
they fall behind in effectiveness.*

* J. Loeb : ' Beitriige zur Physiologic des Grosshirns;; Pflliger's Ar-
chiv, xxxix. 293. I simplify the author's statement.

34

PSYCHOLOGY.

Even when the entire motor zone of a dog is removed,
there is no permanent paralysis of any part, but only this
curious sort of relative inertia when the two sides of the
body are compared ; and this itself becomes hardly notice
able after a number of weeks have elapsed. Prof. Goltz
has described a dog whose entire left hemisphere was de
stroyed, and who retained only a slight motor inertia on the
right half of the body. In particular he could use his right

FIG. 6.— Left Hemisphere of Monkey's Brain. Outer Surface.

paw for holding a bone whilst gnawing it, or for reaching
after a piece of meat. Had he been taught to give his paw
before the operations, it would have been curious to see
whether that faculty also came back. His tactile sensi
bility was permanently diminished on the right side.* In
monkeys a genuine paralysis follows upon ablations of the
cortex in the motor region. This paralysis affects parts of
the body which vary with the brain-parts removed. The
monkey's opposite arm or leg hangs flaccid, or at most takes a
small part in associated movements. When the entire region
is removed there is a genuine and permanent hemiplegia
in which the arm is more affected than the leg; and this is

* Goltz : PflUger's Arcbiv, XLII. 419.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 35

followed months later by contracture of the muscles, as in
man after inveterate hemiplegia.* According to Schaefer
and Horsley, the trunk-muscles also become paralyzed after
destruction of the marginal convolution on both sides (see
Fig. 7). These differences between dogs and monkeys show
the danger of drawing general conclusions from experiments
done on any one sort of animal. I subjoin the figures given
by the last-named authors of the motor regions in the
monkey's brain, f

FIG. 7.— Left Hemisphere of Monkey's Brain. Mesial Surface.

In man we are necessarily reduced to the observation
post-mortem of cortical ablations produced by accident or
disease (tumor, hemorrhage, softening, etc.). What results
during life from such conditions is either localized spasm,
or palsy of certain muscles of the opposite side. The cor
tical regions which invariably produce these results are
homologous with those which we have just been study
ing in the dog, cat, a~e, etc. Figs. 8 and 9 show the result of

* ' Hemiplegia ' means one-sided palsy.

^ f Philosophical Transactions, vol. 179, pp. 6. 10 (1888). In a later paper
(HM. p. 205) Messrs. Beevor and Horsley go into the localization still more
minutely, showing spots from which single muscles or single digits can be
made to contract.

36

PSYCHOLOGY.

169 cases carefully studied by Exner. The parts shaded
are regions where lesions produced no motor disturbance.

FIG. 8.— Right Hemisphere of Human Brain. Lateral Surface.

Those left white were, on the contrary, never injured with
out motor disturbances of some sort. Where the injury to

FIG. 9.— Right Hemisphere of Human Brain. Mesial Surface.

the cortical substance is profound in man, the paralysis is
permanent and is succeeded by muscular rigidity in the
paralyzed parts, just as it may be in the monkey.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 37

(3) Descending degenerations show the intimate connec
tion of the rolandic regions of the cortex with the motor
tracts of the cord. When, either in man or in the lower ani
mals, these regions are destroyed, a peculiar degenerative
change known as secondary sclerosis is found to extend
downwards through the white fibrous substance of the
brain in a perfectly definite manner, affecting certain dis
tinct strands which pass through the inner capsule, crura,
and pons, into the anterior pyramids of the medulla oblon-
gata, and from thence (partly crossing to the other side)
downwards into the anterior (direct) and lateral (crossed)
columns of the spinal cord.

(4) Anatomical proof of the continuity of the rolandic
regions with these motor columns of the cord is also clearly
given. Flechsig's ' Pyramidenbalm ' forms an uninter
rupted strand (distinctly traceable in human embryos,
before its fibres have acquired their white 'medullary
sheath') passing upwards from the pyramids of the me
dulla, and traversing the internal capsule and corona radi-
ata to the convolutions in question (Fig. 10). None of the
inferior gray matter of the brain seems to have any connec
tion with this important fibrous strand. It passes directly
from the cortex to the motor arrangements in the cord, de
pending for its proper nutrition (as the facts of degenera
tion show) on the influence of the cortical cells, just as motor
nerves depend for their nutrition on that of the cells of the
spinal cord. Electrical stimulation of this motor strand in
any accessible part of its course has been nhown in dogs to
produce movements analogous to those which excitement
of the cortical surface calls forth.

One of the most instructive proofs of motor localization
in the cortex is that furnished by the disease now called
aphemia, or motor Aphasia. Motor aphasia is neither loss
of voice nor paralysis of the tongue or lips. The patient's
voice is as strong as ever, and all the innervations of his
hypoglossal and facial nerves, except those necessary for
speaking, may go on perfectly well. He can laugh and cry,
and even sing ; but he either is unable to utter any words at
all ; or a few meaningless stock phrases form his only speech ;
or else he speaks incoherently and confusedly, mispronounc-

38

PSYCHOLOGY.

ing, misplacing, and misusing his words in various degrees.
Sometimes his speech is a mere broth of unintelligible syl
lables. In cases of pure motor aphasia the patient recog-

Cort/ca/

•M spinal __J>.

FIG. lO.-Sehematic Transverse Section of Brain showing Motor Strand -After

-Ldinger.

nizes his mistakes and suffers acutely from them. Now
whenever a patient dies in such a condition as this, and
an examination of his brain is permitted, it is found that

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

39

the lowest frontal gyrus (see Fig. 11) is the seat of injury.
Broca first noticed this fact in 1861, and since then the
gyrus has gone by the name of Broca's convolution. The

Fio. 11.— Schematic Profile
destru

jhematic Profile of T,eft Hemisphere, with the parts shaded whose
ction causes motor (' Broca ') and sensory (' Weruicke ') Aphasia.

injury in right-handed people is found on the left hemi
sphere, and in left-handed people on the right hemisphere.
Most people, in fact, are left-brained, that is, all then
delicate and specialized movements are handed over to
the charge of the left hemisphere. The ordinary right-
handedness for such movements is only a consequence of
that fact, a consequence which shows outwardly on account
of that extensive decussation of the fibres whereby most of
those from the left hemisphere pass to the right half of the
body only. But the left-brainedness might exist in equal
measure and not show outwardly. This would happen
wherever organs on both sides of the body could be gov
erned by the left hemisphere ; and just such a case seems
offered by the vocal organs, in that highly delicate and
special motor service which we call speech. Either hemi
sphere can innervate them bilaterally, just as either seems
able to innervate bilaterally the muscles of the trunk, ribs,
and diaphragm. Of the special movements of speech, how-

40 PSYCHOLOGY.

ever, it would appear (from the facts of aphasia) that the
left hemisphere in most persons habitually takes exclusive
charge. With that hemisphere thrown out of gear, speech is
undone ; even though the opposite hemisphere still be there
for the performance of less specialized acts, such as the
various movements required in eating.

It will be noticed that Broca's region is homologous
with the parts ascertained to produce movements of the
lips, tongue, and larynx when excited by electric currents
in apes (cf. Fig. 6, p. 34). The evidence is therefore as com
plete as it well can be that the motor incitations to these
organs leave the brain by the lower frontal region.

Yictims of motor aphasia generally have other disorders.
One which interests us in this connection has been called
agraphia: they have lost the power to ivrite. They can
read writing and understand it ; but either cannot use the
pen at all or make egregious mistakes with it. The seat
of the lesion here is less well determined, owing to an in
sufficient number of good cases to conclude from.* There
is no doubt, however, that it is (in right-handed people) on
the left side, and little doubt that it consists of elements
of the hand-and-arm region specialized for that service.
The symptom may exist when there is little or no disability
in the hand for other uses. If it does not get well, the
patient usually educates his right hemisphere, i.e. learns
to write with his left hand. In other cases of which we
shall say more a few pages later on, the patient can write
both spontaneously and at dictation, but cannot read even
what he has himself written ! All these phenomena are
now quite clearly explained by separate brain-centres for
the various feelings and movements and tracts for associate
ing these together. But their minute discussion belongs to
medicine rather than to general psychology, and I can only
use them here to illustrate the principles of motor locali
zation, f Under the heads of sight and hearing I shall
have a little more to say.

* Nothuagel und Naunyn ; Die Localization in den Geliirnkrankheiten
(Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 34.

f An accessible account of the history of our knowledge of motor
aphasia is in W. A. Hammond's ' Treatise on the Diseases .of the Nervous
System,' chapter vn.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 41

The different lines of proof which I have taken up
establish conclusively the proposition that all the motor
impulses which leave the cortex pass out, in healthy animals,
from the convolutions about the fissure of Rolando.

When, however, it comes to denning precisely what is
involved in a motor impulse leaving the cortex, things grow
more obscure. Does the impulse start independently from
the convolutions in question, or does it start elsewhere and
merely flow through ? And to what particular phase of
psychic activity does the activity of these centres corre
spond '? Opinions and authorities here divide ; but it will
be better, before entering into these deeper aspects of the
problem, to cast a glance at the facts which have been
made out concerning the relations of the cortex to sight,
hearing, and smell.

Sight.

Ferrier was the first in the field here. He found, when
the angular convolution (that lying between the ' intra
parietal ' and * external occipital ' fissures, and bending
round the top of the fissure of Sylvius, in Fig. 6) was ex
cited in the monkey, that movements of the eyes and head
as if for vision occurred ; and that when it was extirpated,
what he supposed to be total and permanent blindness
of the opposite eye followed. Munk almost immediately
declared total and permanent blindness to follow from de
struction of the occipital lobe in monkeys as well as dogs, and
said that the angular gyrus had nothing to do with sight,
but was only the centre for tactile sensibility of the eyeball.
Munk's absolute tone about his observations and his theo
retic arrogance have led to his ruin as an authority. But he
did two things of permanent value. He was the first to
distinguish in these vivisections between sensorial and
psychic blindness, and to describe the phenomenon of resti
tution of the visual function after its first impairment by
an operation ; and the first to notice the hemiopic character
of the visual disturbances which result when only one
hemisphere is injured. Sensorial blindness is absolute
insensibility to light ; psychic blindness is inability to rec
ognize the meaning of the optical impressions, as when we

42 PSYCHOLOGY.

see a page of Chinese print but it suggests nothing to us.
A hemiopic disturbance of vision is one in which neither
retina is affected in its totality, but in which, for example,
the left portion of each retina is blind, so that the animal
sees nothing situated in space towards its right. Later
observations have corroborated this hemiopic character of
all the disturbances of sight from injury to a single hemi
sphere in the higher animals ; and the question whether
an animal's apparent blindness is sensorial or only psychic
has, since Munk's first publications, been the most urgent
one to answer, in all observations relative to the function of
sight.

Goltz almost simultaneously with Ferrier and Munk
reported experiments which led him to deny that the
visual function was essentially bound up with any one
localized portion of the hemispheres. Other divergent
results soon came in from many quarters, so that, without
going into the history of the matter any more, I may report
the existing state of the case as follows : *

In fishes, frogs, and lizards vision persists when the
hemispheres are entirely removed. This is admitted for
frogs and fishes even by Munk, who denies it for birds.

All of Munk's birds seemed totally blind (blind senso-
rially) after removal of the hemispheres by his operation.
The following of a candle by the head and winking at a
threatened blow, which are ordinarily held to prove the
retention of crude optical sensations by the lower centres
in supposed hemisphereless pigeons, are by Munk ascribed
to vestiges of the visual sphere of the cortex left behind
by the imperfection of the operation. But Schrader, who
operated after Munk and with every apparent guarantee of
completeness, found that all his pigeons saw after two
or three weeks had elapsed, and the inhibitions resulting
from the wound had passed away. They invariably avoided
even the slightest obstacles, flew very regularly towards
certain perches, etc., differing toto ccelo in these respects
with certain simply blinded pigeons who were kept with

* The history up to 1885 may be found in A. Christian! : Zur Physi
ologie des Gehirnes 'Berlin. 18sT>\.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 43

them for comparison. They did not pick up food strewn
on the ground, however. Schrader found that they would
do this if even a small part of the frontal region of the
hemispheres was left, and ascribes their non-self-feeding
when deprived of their occipital cerebrum not to a visual,
but to a motor, defect, a sort of alimentary aphasia.*

In presence of such discord as that between Munk and
his opponents one must carefully note how differently sig
nificant is loss, from preservation, of a function after an opera
tion on the brain. The loss of the function does not neces
sarily show that it is dependent on the part cut out ; but its
preservation does show that it is not dependent : and this is
true though the loss should be observed ninety-nine times
and the preservation only once in a hundred similar excisions.
That birds and mammals can be blinded by cortical abla
tion is undoubted ; the only question is, must they be so ?
Only then can the cortex be certainly called the * seat of
sight.' The blindness may always be due to one of those
remote effects of the wound on distant parts, inhibitions,
extensions of inflammation, — interferences, in a word, —
upon which Brown-Sequard and Goltz have rightly insisted,
and the importance of which becomes more manifest every
day. Such effects are transient ; whereas the symptoms of
deprivation (Ausfallserscheinungen, as Goltz calls them) which
come from the actual loss of the cut-out region must from
the nature of the case be permanent. Blindness in the
pigeons, so far as it passes away, cannot possibly be charged
to their seat of vision being lost, but only to some influence
which temporarily depresses the activity of that seat.
The same is true mutatis mutandis of all the other effects of
operations, and as we pass to mammals we shall see still
more the importance of the remark.

In rabbits loss of the entire cortex seems compatible
with the preservation of enough sight to guide the poor
animals' movements, and enable them to avoid obstacles.
Christian!' s observations and discussions seem conclusively

* Pfl tiger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 176. Munk (Berlin Academy Sitzsungs-
berichte, 1889, xxxi) returns to the charge, denying the extirpations of
Schrader to be complete : ' ' Microscopic portions of the SelispMre must

44 PSYCHOLOGY.

to have established this, although Munk found that all his
animals were made totally blind.*

In dogs also Munk found absolute stone-blindness after
ablation of the occipital lobes. He went farther and
mapped out determinate portions of the cortex thereupon,
which he considered correlated with definite segments of the
two retinae, so that destruction of given portions of the cor
tex produces blindness of the retinal centre, top, bottom,
or right or left side, of the same or opposite eye. There
seems little doubt that this definite correlation is mythologi
cal. Other observers, Hitzig, Goltz, Luciani, Loeb, Exner,
etc., find, whatever part of the cortex may be ablated on
one side, that there usually results a hemiopic disturbance
of loth eyes, slight and transient when the anterior lobes
are the parts attacked, grave when an occipital lobe is the
seat of injury, and lasting in proportion to the latter's
extent. According to Loeb, the defect is a dimness of vis
ion (' hemiamblyopia') in which (however severe) the centres
remain the best seeing portions of the retina, just as they
are in normal dogs. The lateral or temporal part of each
retina seems to be in exclusive connection with the cortex
of its own side. The centre and nasal part of each seems,
on the contrary, to be connected with the cortex of the
opposite hemispheres. Loeb, who takes broader views
than any one, conceives the hemiamblyopia as he con
ceives the motor disturbances, namely, as the expression
of an increased inertia in the whole optical machinery, of
which the result is to make the animal respond with greater
effort to impressions coming from the half of space opposed
to the side of the lesion. If a dog has right hemiamblyopia,
say, and two pieces of meat are hung before him at once,
he invariably turns first to the one on his left. But if the
lesion be a slight one, shaking slightly the piece of meat
on his right (this makes of it a stronger stimulus) makes him
seize upon it first. If only one piece of meat be offered, he
takes it, on whichever side it be.

When both occipital lobes are extensively destroyed
total blindness may result. Munk maps out his ' Seh-

* A. Christian!: Zur Physiol. d. Gehirnes (Berlin, 1885), chaps, n, in, iv.
H. Munk : Berlin Akad. Stzgsb. 1884, xxiv.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

45

sphare ' definitely, and says that blindness must result
when the entire shaded part, marked A, A, in Figs. 12
and 13, is involved in the lesion. Discrepant reports
of other observations he explains as due to incomplete

FIG. 12. FIG. 13.

The Dog's visual centre according to Munk, the entire striated region, A, A, being the
exclusive seat of vision, and the dark central circle, A', being correlated with the
retinal centre of the opposite eye.

ablation. Luciani, Goltz, and Lannegrace, however, con
tend that they have made complete bilateral extirpations
of Munk's Sehsphare more than once, and found a sort
of crude indiscriminating sight of objects to return in a
few Aveeks.* The question whether a dog is blind or not
is harder to solve than would at first appear ; for simply
blinded dogs, in places to which they are accustomed, show
little of their loss and avoid all obstacles; whilst dogs
whose occipital lobes are gone may run against things fre
quently and yet see notwithstanding. The best proof that
they may see is that which Goltz's dogs furnished : they
carefully avoided, as it seemed, strips of sunshine or paper
on the floor, as if they were solid obstacles. This no really
blind dog would do. Luciani tested his dogs when hungry
(a condition which sharpens their attention) by strewing

* Luciani und Scppili : Die Functions-Localization auf dev Grosshirn-
rinde (Deutsch von Fraeukel), Leipzig, 1886, Dogs M, N, and S. Goltz in
Pfluger's Archiv, vol. 84, pp. 490-6; vol. 42, p. 454. Cf. also Munk: Berlin
Akad. Stzgsb. 1886, vii, vm, pp. 113-121, and Loeb: Pfluger's Archiv,
vol. 39, p. 337.

46

PSYCHOLOGY.

pieces of meat and pieces of cork before them. If they
went straight at them, they saw; and if they chose the meat
and left the cork, they saw discriminatingly. The quarrel
is very acrimonious ; indeed the subject of localization of
functions in the brain seems to have a peculiar effect on the
temper of those who cultivate it experimentally. The
amount of preserved vision which Goltz and Luciani report
seems hardly to be worth considering, on the one hand;
and on the other, Munk admits in his penultimate paper
that out of 85 dogs he only ' succeeded ' 4 times in his opera
tion of producing complete blindness by complete extirpa
tion of his '-Sehsphare.' * The safe conclusion for us is that
Luciani's diagram, Fig. 14, represents something like the

FIG. 14.— Distribution of the Visual Function in the Cortex, according to Luciani.

truth. The occipital lobes are far more important for
vision than any other part of the cortex, so that their com
plete destruction makes the animal almost blind. As for
the crude sensibility to light which may then remain, noth
ing exact is known either about its nature or its seat.

In the monkey, doctors also disagree. The truth seems,
however, to be that the occipital lobes in this animal also are
the part connected most intimately with the visual function.
The function would seem to go on when very small portions
of them are left, for Ferrier found no ' appreciable impair
ment ' of it after almost complete destruction of them on both
sides. On the other hand, he found complete and perma
nent blindness to ensue when they and the angular gyri in
addition were destroyed on both sides. Munk, as well as

* Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte, 1886, vii, vm, p. 124.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 47

Brown and Schaefer, found no disturbance of sight from
destroying the angular gyri alone, although Ferrier found
blindness to ensue. This blindness was probably due to
inhibitions exerted in distans, or to cutting of the white
optical fibres passing under the angular gyri on their way
to the occipital lobes. Brown and Schaefer got complete
and permanent blindness in one monkey from total destruc
tion of both occipital lobes. Luciani and Seppili, perform
ing this operation on two monkeys, found that the animals
were only mentally, not sensorially, blind. After some
weeks they saw their food, but could not distinguish by
sight between figs and pieces of cork. Luciani and Seppili
seem, however, not to have extirpated the entire lobes.
When one lobe only is injured the affection of sight is
hemiopic in monkeys: in this all observers agree. On
the whole, then, Munk's original location of vision ID the
occipital lobes is confirmed by the later evidence.*

In man we have more exact results, since we are not
driven to interpret the vision from the outward conduct.
On the other hand, however, we cannot vivisect, but must
wait for pathological lesions to turn up. The pathologists
who have discussed these (the literature is tedious ad libi
tum) conclude that the occipital lobes are the indispensable
part for vision in man. Hemiopic disturbance in both eyes
comes from lesion of either one of them, and total blindness,
sensorial as well as psychic, from destruction of both.

Hemiopia may also result from lesion in other parts,
especially the neighboring angular and supra-marginal gyri,
and it may accompany extensive injury in the motor region
of the cortex. In these cases it seems probable that it is
due to an actio in distans, probably to the interruption oi

* H. Munk: Functionen der Grosshirnrinde (Berlin, 1881), pp. 36-40
Ferrier : Functions, etc.,2ded., chap, ix, pt. i. Brown and Schaefer.
Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 321. Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. pp.
131-138. Lannegrace found traces of sight with both occipital lobes de
stroyed, and in one monkey even when angular gyri and occipital lobes
were destroyed altogether. His paper is in the Archives de Medeciue
Experimentale for January and March, 1889. I only know it from the
abstract in the Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, pp. 108-420. The reporter
doubts the evidence of vision in the monkey. It appears to have consisted
in avoiding obstacles and in emotional disturbance in the presence of men.

48 PSYCHOLOGY.

fibres proceeding from the occipital lobe. There seem to
be a few cases on record where there was injury to the
occipital lobes without visual defect. Ferrier has collected
as many as possible to prove his localization in the angular
gyrus.* A strict application of logical principles would make
one of these cases outweigh one hundred contrary ones. And
yet, remembering how imperfect observations may be, and
how individual brains may vary, it would certainly be rash for
their sake to throw away the enormous amount of positive
evidence for the occipital lobes. Individual variability is
always a possible explanation of an anomalous case. There
is no more prominent anatomical fact than that of the ' de-
cussation of the pyramids,' nor any more usual pathologi
cal fact than its consequence, that left-handed hemorrhages
into the motor region produce right-handed paralyses.
And yet the decussation is variable in amount, and seems
sometimes to be absent altogether, f If, in such a case as
this last, the left brain were to become the seat of apoplexy,
the left and not the right half of the body would be the
one to suffer paralysis.

The schema on the opposite page, copied from Dr.
Seguin, expresses, on the whole, the probable truth about the
regions concerned in vision. Not the entire occipital lobes,
but the so-called cunei, and the first convolutions, are the
cortical parts most intimately concerned. Nothnagel agrees
with Seguin in this limitation of the essential tracts. :[

A most interesting effect of cortical disorder is mental
blindness. This consists not so much in insensibility to
optical impressions, as in inability to understand them.
Psychologically it is interpretable as loss of associations be
tween optical sensations and what they signify ; and any
interruption of the paths between the optic centres and the
centres for other ideas ought to bring it about. Thus,

* Localization of Cerebral Disease (1878), pp. 117-8.

t For cases see Flecbsig : Die Leitungsbahnen iu Gehiru u. Riickenmark
(Leipzig, 1876), pp. 112, 272; Exner'sUntersuchungen, etc., p. 83 ; Ferrier s
Localization, etc., p. 11; Francois-Franck's Cerveau Moteur, p. 63, note.

| E. C. Seguin : Hemianopsia of Cerebral Origin, in Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, vol. xnr. p. 30. Notbuagel und Naunyn : Ueber die
Localization der Gehirnkrankbeiten (Wiesbaden, 1887), p. 10.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

49

printed letters of the alphabet, or words, signify certain
sounds and certain articulatory movements. If the con
nection between the articulating or auditory centres, on the
one hand, and the visual centres on the other, be ruptured

L T. r.

R.N.

L.O.S L 0.0

FIQ. 15.— Scheme of the mechanism of vision, after Seguin. The cuneus convolution
(0u) of the right occipital lobe is supposed to be injured, and all the parts which
lead to it are darkly shaded to show that they fail to exert their function. F O are
the intra-hemispheric optical fibres. P. O. C. is the region of the lower optic cen
tres (corpora geuiculata and quadrigemina). T. O. D. is the right optic tract- C the
chiasma; F. L. D. are the fibres going to the lateral or temporal half 2' of the rteht
retina; and F. C. 8 are those going to the central or nasal half of the left retina
O. D. is the right, and O. S. the left eyeball. The rightward half of each is there
fore blind: in other words, the right nasal field, R. N. F., and the left temporal field
L. T. F., have become invisible to the subject with the lesion at Cu.

we ought a priori to expect that the sight of words would
fail to awaken the idea of their sound, or the movement for
pronouncing them. We ought, in short, to have alexia, or
inability to read : and this is just what we do have in many

50 PSYCHOLOGY.

cases of extensive injury about the fronto-teinporal regions,
as a complication of aphasic disease. Nothnagel suggests
that whilst the cuneus is the seat of optical sensations, the
other parts of the occipital lobe may be the field of optical
memories and ideas, from the loss of which mental blind
ness should ensue. In fact, all the medical authors speak
of mental blindness as if it must consist in the loss of visual
images from the memory. It seems to me, however, that
this is a psychological misapprehension. A man whose
power of visual imagination has decayed (no unusual phe
nomenon in its lighter grades) is not mentally blind in
the least, for he recognizes perfectly all that he sees. On
the other hand, he may be mentally blind, with his optical
imagination well preserved ; as in the interesting case pub
lished by Wilbrand in 1887.* In the still more interest
ing case of mental blindness recently published by Lissauer,t
though the patient made the most ludicrous mistakes, call
ing for instance a clothes-brush a pair of spectacles, an um
brella a plant with flowers, an apple a portrait of a lady, etc.
etc., he seemed, according to the reporter, to have his men
tal images fairly well preserved. It is in fact the momen
tary loss of our wow-optical images which makes us mentally
blind, just as it is that of our wow-auditory images which
makes us mentally deaf. I am mentally deaf if, hearing a
bell, I can't recall how it looks; and mentally blind if, see
ing it, I can't recall its sound or its name. As a matter of
fact, I should have to be not merely mentally blind, but
stone-blind, if all my visual images were lost. For although
I am blind to the right half of the field of view if my
left occipital region is injured, and to the left half if my
right region is injured, such hemianopsia does not deprive
me of visual images, experience seeming to show that
the unaffected hemisphere is always sufficient for pro
duction of these. To abolish them entirely I should have
to be deprived of both occipital lobes, and that would de
prive me not only of my inward images of sight, but of my

^ * Die Seelenblindheit, etc., p. 51 ff. The mental blindness was in
this woman's case moderate in degree.
t Archiv f. Psychiatric, vol. 21, p. 222.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 51

sight altogether.* Kecent pathological annals seem to offer
a few such cases. t Meanwhile there are a number of cases
of mental blindness, especially for written language, coupled
with hemianopsia, usually of the rightward field of view.
These are all explicable by the breaking down, through
disease, of the connecting tracts between the occipital lobes
and other parts of the brain, especially those which go to
the centres for speech in the frontal and temporal regions of
the left hemisphere. They are to be classed among distur
bances of conduction or of association ; and nowhere can I find
any fact which should force us to believe that optical images
needj be lost in mental blindness, or that the cerebral
centres for such images are locally distinct from those for
direct sensations from the eyes. §

Where an object fails to be recognized by sight, it often
happens that the patient will recognize and name it as soon
as he touches it with his hand. This shows in an interest-

* Nothnagel (loc. cit. p. 22) says : " Dies trifft aber niclitzu." He gives,
however, no case in support of his opinion that double-sided cortical lesion
may make one stone-blind and yet not destroy one's visual images ; so that
I do not know whether it is an observation of fact or an a priori as
sumption.

f In a case published by C. S. Freund : Archiv f. Psychiatric, vol. xx, the
occipital lobes were injured, but their cortex was not destroyed, on both
sides. There was still vision. Of. pp. 291-5.

\ I say ' need, ' for I do not of course deny the possible coexistence of the
two symptoms. Many a brain-lesion might block optical associations and at
the same time impair optical imagination, without entirely stopping vision.
Such a case seems to have been the remarkable one from Charcot which I
shall give rather fully in the chapter on Imagination.

§ Freund (in the article cited above ' Ueber optZsche Aphasie und
Seelenblindheit ') and Bruns (' Ein Fall von Alexie,' etc., in the Neuro-
logisches Centralblatt for 1888, pp. 581, 509) explain their cases by broken-
down conduction. Wilbraud, whose painstaking monograph on mental
blindness was referred to a moment ago, gives none but a priori reasons for
his belief that the optical 'Erinnerungsfeld ' must be locally distinct from
the Wahrnehmungsfeld (cf. pp. 84, 93). The a priori reasons are really the
other way. Mauthner (' Gehirn u. Auge ' (1881), p. 487 ff.) tries to show
that the ' mental blindness' of Muuk's dogs and apes after occipital mutila
tion was not such, but real dimness of sight. The best case of mental
blindness yet reported is that by Lissauer, as above. The reader will also
do well to read Bernard : De 1'Aphasie (1885) chap, v; Ballet : Le Laugage
Interieur (1886), chap, vin ; and Jas. Koss's little book on Aphasia (1887).
p. 74

52 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing way how numerous the associative paths are which all
end by running out of the brain through the channel of
speech. The hand-path is open, though the eye-path be
closed. When mental blindness is most complete, neither
sight, touch, nor sound avails to steer the patient, and a sort
of dementia which has been called asymbolia or apraxia is
the result. The commonest articles are not understood.
The patient will put his breeches on one shoulder and his
hat upon the other, will bite into the soap and lay his shoes
on the table, or take his food into his hand and throw it
down again, not knowing what to do with it, etc. Such dis
order can only come from extensive brain-injury.*

The method of degeneration corroborates the other evi
dence localizing the tracts of vision. In young animals one
gets secondary degeneration of the occipital regions from
destroying an eyeball, and, vice versa, degeneration of the
optic nerves from destroying the occipital regions. The
corpora geniculata, thalami, and subcortical fibres leading
to the occipital lobes are also found atrophied in these
cases. The phenomena are not uniform, but are indispu
table ; f so that, taking all lines of evidence together, the
special connection of vision with the occipital lobes is per
fectly made out. It should be added that the occipital
lobes have frequently been found shrunken in cases of in
veterate blindness in man.

Hearing.

Hearing is hardly as definitely localized as sight. In the
dog, Luciani's diagram will show the regions which directly or
indirectly affect it for the worse when injured. As with sight,
one-sided lesions produce symptoms on both sides. The
mixture of black dots and gray dots in the diagram is meant
to represent this mixture of ' crossed ' and ' uncrossed ' con
nections, though of course no topographical exactitude is
aimed at. Of all the region, the temporal lobe is the most
important part ; yet permanent absolute deafness did not

* For a case see Wernicke's Lelirb. d. Gehirnkrankhciten vol n p
554 (1881).

f The latest account of them is the paper ' Uber die optischen Cenlren
Bahnen' by von Monakow in the Archiv fur Psychiatric, vol. xx. p. 714.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 53

result in a dog of Luciani's, even from bilateral destruction
of both temporal lobes in their entirety. *

In the monkey, Ferrier and Yeo once found permanent
deafness to follow destruction of the upper temporal con
volution (the one just below the fissure of Sylvius in Fig.

FIG. 16.— Luciani's Hearing Region.

6) on both sides. Brown and Schaefer found, on the con
trary, that in several monkeys this operation failed to notice
ably affect the hearing. In one animal, indeed, both entire
temporal lobes were destroyed. After a week or two of
depression of the mental faculties this beast recovered and
became one of the brightest monkeys possible, domineering
over all his mates, and admitted by all who saw him to
have all his senses, including hearing, 'perfectly acute.' f
Terrible recriminations have, as usual, ensued between the
investigators, Ferrier denying that Brown and Schaefer's
ablations were complete, J Schaefer that Ferrier's monkey
was really deaf.§ In this unsatisfactory condition the sub
ject must be left, although there seems no reason to doubt
that Brown and Schaefer's observation is the more important
of the two.

In man the temporal lobe is unquestionably the seat of
the hearing function, and the superior convolution adjacent
to the sylvian fissure is its most important part. The phe
nomena of aphasia show this. We studied motor aphasia a
few pages back ; we must now consider sensory aphasia.

* Die Functions-Localization, etc., Dog X; see also p. 161.
f Philos. Trans., vol. 179, p. 312.
$ Brain, vol. xi. p. 10.
§ Ibid. p. 147

54 PSYCHOLOGY.

Our knowledge of this disease has had three stages : we
may talk of the period of Broca, the period of Wernicke,
and the period of Charcot. What Broca's discovery was we
have seen. Wernicke was the first to discriminate those
cases in which the patient can not even understand speech
from those in which he can understand, only not talk ; and
to ascribe the former condition to lesion of the temporal
lobe.* The condition in question is word-deafness, and the
disease is auditory aphasia. The latest statistical survey of
the subject is that by Dr. Allen Starr, f In the seven cases
oipure word-deafness which he has collected, cases in which
the patient could read, talk, and write, but not understand
what was said to him, the lesion was limited to the first and
second temporal convolutions in their posterior two thirds.
The lesion (in right-handed, i.e. left-brained, persons) is
always on the left side, like the lesion in motor aphasia.
Crude hearing would not be abolished, even were the left
centre for it utterly destroyed ; the right centre would still
provide for that. But the linguistic use of hearing appears
bound up with the integrity of the left centre more or less
exclusively. Here it must be that words heard enter into
association with the things which they represent, on the one
hand, and with the movements necessary for pronouncing
them, on the other. In a large majority of Dr. Starr's fifty
cases, the power either to name objects or to talk coherently
was impaired. This shows that in most of us (as Wernicke
said) speech must go on from auditory cues ; that is, it
must be that our ideas do not innervate our motor centres
directly, but only after first arousing the mental sound of
the words. This is the immediate stimulus to articulation ;
and where the possibility of this is abolished by the de
struction of its usual channel in the left temporal lobe, the
articulation must suffer. In the few cases in which the
channel is abolished with no bad effect on speech we must
suppose an idiosyncrasy. The patient must innervate his
speech-organs either from the corresponding portion of the
other hemisphere or directly from the centres of ideation,

* Der aphasische Symptomencomplex (1874). See in Fig. 11 the con
volution marked WERNICKE.

f 'The Pathology of Sensory Aphasia,' 'Brain/ July, 1889.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 55

those, namely, of vision, touch, etc., without leaning on the
auditory region. It is the minuter analysis of the facts in
the light of such individual differences as these which con
stitutes Charcot's contribution towards clearing up the
subject.

Every namable thing, act, or relation has numerous
properties, qualities, or aspects. In our minds the proper
ties of each thing, together with its name, form an associated
group. If different parts of the brain are severally con
cerned with the several properties, and a farther part with
the hearing, and still another with the uttering, of the name,
there must inevitably be brought about (through the law of
association which we shall later study) such a dynamic connec
tion amongst all these brain-parts that the activity of any one
of them wiJl be likely to awaken the activity of all the rest.
When we are talking as we think, the ultimate process is that
of utterance. If the brain-part for that be injured, speech
is impossible or disorderly, even though all the other brain-
parts be intact : and this is just the condition of things
which, on page 37, we found to be brought about by
limited lesion of the left inferior frontal convolution. But
back of that last act various orders of succession are
possible in the associations of a talking man's ideas. The
more usual order seems to be from the tactile, visual, or
other properties of the things thought-about to the sound
of their names, and then to the latter's utterance. But if in
a certain individual the thought of the look of an object or
of the look of its printed name be the process which
habitually precedes articulation, then the loss of the
hearing centre will pro tanto not affect that individual's
speech. He will be mentally deaf, i.e. his understanding of
speech will suffer, but he will not be aphasic. In this way
it is possible to explain the seven cases of pure word-deaf
ness which figure in Dr. Starr's table.

If this order of association be ingrained and habitual in
that individual, injury to his visucd centres will make him
not only word- blind, but aphasic as well. His speech will
become confused in consequence of an occipital lesion.
Naunyn, consequently, plotting out on a diagram of the
hemisphere the 71 irreproachably reported cases of

56 PSYCHOLOGY.

aphasia which he was able to collect, finds that the lesions
concentrate themselves in three places : first, on Broca's
centre ; second, on Wernicke's ; third, on the supra-marginal
and angular gyri under which those fibres pass which con
nect the visual centres with the rest of the brain* (see Fig.
17). With this result Dr. Starr's analysis of purely sensory
cases agrees.

Pio. li.

In a later chapter we shall again return to these differences
in the effectiveness of the sensory spheres in different
individuals. Meanwhile few things show more beautifully
than the history of our knowledge of aphasia how the
sagacity and patience of many banded workers are in time
certain to analyze the darkest confusion into an orderly
display. f There is no ' centre of Speech' in the brain any
more than there is a faculty of Speech in the mind. The
entire brain, more or less, is at work in a man who uses
language. The subjoined diagram, from Koss, shows the
four parts most critically concerned, and, in the light of our
text, needs no farther explanation (see Fig. 18).

*Nothnagel und Naunyn : op. eit., plates.

f Ballet's and Bernard's works cited on p. 51 are the most accessible
documents of Charcot's school. Bastian's book on the Brain as an Organ
of Mind (last three chapters) is also good.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN.

Smell.

Everything conspires to point to the median descending
part of the temporal lobes as being the organs of smell.
Even Terrier and Munk agree on the hippocampal gyrus,

Fia. 18.

though Ferrier restricts olfaction, as Munk does not, to the
lobule or uncinate process of the convolution, reserving the
rest of it for touch. Anatomy and pathology also point to
the hippocampal gyrus ; but as the matter is less interest
ing from the point of view of human psychology than were
sight and hearing, I will say no more, but simply add
LucianiandSeppili's diagram of the dog's smell-centre.* Of

*For details, see Ferrier's 'Functions,' chap, ix. pt. m, and Chas.
K. Mills : Transactions of Congress of American Physicians and Sur
geons, 1888, vol. i. p. 278.

58

PSYCHOLOGY.

Taste

we know little that is definite. What little there is points
to the lower temporal regions again. Consult Terrier as
below.

Touch.

Interesting problems arise with regard to the seat of
tactile and muscular sensibility. Hitzig, whose experiments
on dogs' brains fifteen years ago opened the entire subject

Fia. 19. — Luciani's Olfactory Region in the Dog.

which we are discussing, ascribed the disorders of motility
observed after ablations of the motor region to a loss of
what he called muscular consciousness. The animals do
not notice eccentric positions of their limbs, will stand with
their legs crossed, with the affected paw resting on its back
or hanging over a table's edge, etc.; and do not resist our
bending and stretching of it as they resist with the un
affected paw. Goltz, Munk, Schiff, Herzen, and others
promptly ascertained an equal defect of cutaneous sensi
bility to pain, touch, and cold. The paw is not withdrawn
when pinched, remains standing in cold water, etc. Fer-
rier meanwhile denied that there was any true anaesthesia
produced by ablations in the motor zone, and explains
the appearance of it as an effect of the sluggish motor
responses of the affected side.* Munkf and Schiff J, on the

* Functions of the Brain, chap. x. § 14.
tUeber die Functionen d. Grosshirnrinde (1881), p. 50
JLezioni di Fisiologia sperirnentale sul sistema nervoso encefalico
(1 73), p. 527 ff. Also 'Brain/ vol. ix. p. 298.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 69

contrary, conceive of the ' motor zone ' as essentially sen
sory, and in different ways explain the motor disorders as
secondary results of the anaesthesia which is always there,
Munk calls the motor zone the Fiihlsphare of the animal's
limbs, etc., and makes it coordinate with the Sehsphiire,
the Horsphiire, etc., the entire cortex being, according to
him, nothing but a projection-surface for sensations, with
no exclusively or essentially motor part. Such a view
would be important if true, through its bearings on the
psychology of volition. What is the truth? As regards
the fact of cutaneous anaesthesia from motor-zone ablationsv
all other observers are against Ferrier, so that he is proba
bly wrong in denying it. On the other hand, Munk and
Schiff are wrong in making the motor symptoms depend on
the anaesthesia, for in certain rare cases they have been
observed to exist not only without insensibility, but with
actual hypersesthesia of the parts.* The motor and
sensory symptoms seem, therefore, to be independent
variables.

In monkeys the latest experiments are those of Horsley
and Schaefer,f whose results Ferrier accepts. They find
that excision of the hippocampal convolution produces tran
sient insensibility of the opposite side of the body, and that
permanent insensibility is produced by destruction of its
continuation upwards above the corpus callosum, the so-
called gyrus fornicatus (the part just below the ' calloso-
marginal fissure ' in Fig. 7). The insensibility is at its maxi
mum when the entire tract comprising both convolutions is
destroyed. Ferrier says that the sensibility of monkeys is
'entirely unaffected' by ablations of the motor zone,J and
Horsley and Schaefer consider it by no means necessarily

*Bechterew (Pfluger's Archiv., vol. 35, p. 137) found no anaesthesia in
a cat with motor symptoms from ablation of sigmoid gyrus. Luciani got
hypersesthesia coexistent with cortical motor defect in a dog, by simulta
neously hemisecting the spinal cord (Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. p. 234).
Goltz frequently found hyperaesthesia of the whole body to accompany
motor defect after ablation of both frontal lobes, and he once found it
after ablating the motor zone (Pfliiger's Archiv, vol. 34, p. 471).

f Philos. Transactions, vol. 179, p. 20 ff.

| Functions, p. 375,

60 PSYCHOLOGY.

abolished.* Luciani found it diminished in his three ex
periments on apes.f

In man we have the fact that one-sided paralysis from
disease of the opposite motor zone may or may not be
accompanied with anaesthesia of the parts. Luciani, who

FIG. 20.— Luciani's Tactile Region in the Dog.

believes that the motor zone is also sensory, tries to minim
ize the value of this evidence by pointing to the insufficiency
with which patients are examined. He himself believes that
in dogs the tactile sphere extends backwards and forwards
of the directly excitable region, into the frontal and parietal
lobes (see Fig. 20). Nothnagel considers that pathological
evidence points in the same direction ; ;£ and Dr. Mills, care
fully reviewing the evidence, adds the gyri fornicatus and
hippocampi to the cutaneo-muscular region in man.§ If one
compare Luciani's diagrams together (Figs. 14, 16, 19, 20)
one will see that the entire parietal region of the dog's skull
is common to the four senses of sight, hearing, smell, and
touch, including muscular feeling. The corresponding re
gion in the human brain (upper parietal and supra-marginal
gyri — see Fig. 17, p. 56) seems to be a somewhat similar
place of conflux. Optical aphasias and motor and tactile
disturbances all result from its injury, especially when that is
on the left side.ll The lower we go in the animal scale the

* Pp. 15-17. f Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. pp. 275-288.
t Op. cit. p. 18. § Trans, of Congress, etc., p. 272.

j See Exner's Unters. lib. Localization, plate xxv.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 61

less differentiated the functions of the several brain-parts
seem to be.* It may be that the region in question still
represents in ourselves something like this primitive condi
tion, and that the surrounding parts, in adapting themselves
more and more to specialized and narrow functions, have
left it as a sort of carrefour through which they send cur
rents and converse. That it should be connected with
musculo-cutaneous feeling is, however, no reason why the
motor zone proper should not be so connected too. And
the cases of paralysis from the motor zone with no accom
panying anaesthesia may be explicable without denying all
sensory function to that region. For, as my colleague Dr.
James Putnam informs me, sensibility is always harder to
kill than motility, even where we know for a certainty that
the lesion affects tracts that are both sensory and motor.
Persons whose hand is paralyzed in its movements from
compression of arm-nerves during sleep, still feel with their
fingers ; and they may still feel in their feet when their legs
are paralyzed by bruising of the spinal cord. In a simi
lar way, the motor cortex might be sensitive as well as
motor, and yet by this greater subtlety (or whatever the
peculiarity may be) in the sensory currents, the sensibility
might survive an amount of injury there by which the
motility was destroyed. Nothnagel considers that there are
grounds for supposing the muscular sense to be exclusively
connected with the parietal lobe and not with the motor
zone. " Disease of this lobe gives pure ataxy without palsy,
and of the motor zone pure palsy without loss of muscular
sense." f He fails, however, to convince more competent
critics than the present writer,:]: so I conclude with them
that as yet we have no decisive grounds for locating muscular
and cutaneous feeling apart. Much still remains to be
learned about the relations between musculo-cutaneous
sensibility and the cortex, but one thing is certain: that
neither the occipital, the forward frontal, nor the temporal
lobes seem to have anything essential to do with it in man.

* Cf. Ferrier's Functions, etc., chap, iv and chap, x, §§ 6 to 9.
f Op. cit. p. 17.

\ E.g. Starr, loc. cit. p 272; Leyden, Beitrilge zur Lehre v. d. Localiza
tion im Gehirn (1888), p. 72.

62 PSYCHOLOGY.

It is knit up with the performances of the motor zone and
of the convolutions backwards and midtvards of them. The
reader must remember this conclusion when we come tc
the chapter on the Will.

I must add a word about the connection of aphasia
with the tactile sense. On p. 40 I spoke of those cases
in which the patient can write but not read his own writ
ing. He cannot read by his eyes ; but he can read by the
feeling in his fingers, if he retrace the letters in the air.
It is convenient for such a patient to have a pen in hand
whilst reading in this way, in order to make the usual feel
ing of writing more complete.* In such a case we must
suppose that the path between the optical and the graphic
centres remains open, whilst that between the optical and
the auditory and articulatory centres is closed. Only thus
can we understand how the look of the writing should fail
to suggest the sound of the words to the patient's mind,
whilst it still suggests the proper movements of graphic
imitation. These movements in their turn must of course
be felt, and the feeling of them must be associated with
the centres for hearing and pronouncing the words. The
injury in cases like this where very special combinations
fail, whilst others go on as usual, must always be supposed
to be of the nature of increased resistance to the passage
of certain currents of association. If any of the elements of
mental function were destroyed the incapacity would
necessarily be much more formidable. A patient who can
both read and write with his fingers most likely uses an
identical ' graphic ' centre, at once sensory and motor, for
both operations.

I have now given, as far as the nature of this book will
allow, a complete account of the present state of the locali
zation-question. In its main outlines it stands firm, though
much has still to be discovered. The anterior frontal lobes,
for example, so far as is yet known, have no definite functions.
G-oltz finds that dogs bereft of them both are incessantly in
motion, and excitable by every small stimulus. They are

* Bernard, op. cit. p. 84.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 63

kascible and amative in an extraordinary degree, and their
sides grow bare with perpetual reflex scratching ; but they
show no local troubles of either motion or sensibility. In
monkeys not even this lack of inhibitory ability is shown,
and neither stimulation nor excision of the prefrontal lobes
produces any symptoms whatever. One monkey of Horsley
and Schaefer's was as tame, and did certain tricks as well
after as before the operation.* It is probable that we have
about reached the limits of what can be learned about brain-
functions from vivisecting inferior animals, and that we
must hereafter look more exclusively to human pathology
for light. The existence of separate speech and writing
centres in the left hemisphere in man ; the fact that palsy
from cortical injury is so much more complete and endur
ing in man and the monkey than in dogs ; and the farther
fact that it seems more difficult to get complete sensorial
blindness from cortical ablations in the lower animals than
in man, all show that functions get more specially local
ized as evolution goes on. In birds localization seems
hardly to exist, and in rodents it is much less conspicuous
than in carnivora. Even for man, however, Munk's way of
mapping out the cortex into absolute areas within which
only one movement or sensation is represented is surely
false. The truth seems to be rather that, although there is
a correspondence of certain regions of the brain to certain
regions of the body, yet the several parts within each bodily
region are represented throughout the whole of the corre
sponding brain-region like pepper and salt sprinkled from
the same caster. This, however, does not prevent each
' part ' from having its focus at one spot within the brain-
region. The various brain-regions merge into each other
in the same mixed way. As Mr. Horsley says : " There are
border centres, and the area of representation of the face
merges into that for the representation of the upper limb.
If there was a focal lesion at that point, you would have
the movements of these two parts starting together." f

* Philos. Trans., vol. 179, p. 3.

f Trans, of Congress of Am. Phys. and Surg. 1888, vol. i. p. 343.
Beevor and Horsley's paper on electric stimulation of the monkey's bruin
is the most beautiful work yet done for precision. See Phil. Trans., vol.
179, p. 205, especially the plates.

64

PSYCHOLOGY.

The accompanying figure from Paneth shows just how the

matter stands in the dog.*

I am speaking now of localiza
tions breadthwise over the brain-
surface. It is conceivable that
there might be also localizations
depthwise through the cortex. The
more superficial cells are smaller,
the deepest layer of them is large ;
and it has been suggested that the
superficial cells are sensorial, the
deeper ones motor ;f or that the
superficial ones in the motor region
are correlated with the extremities
of the organs to be moved (fingers,
etc.), the deeper ones with the more
central segments (wrist, elbow,
etc.). J It need hardly be said that
all such theories are as yet but
guesses.

We thus see that the postulate
of Meynert and Jackson which we
started with en p. 30 is on the whole
most satisfactorily corroborated
by subsequent objective research.
The highest centres do probably

FIG. 21. -Dog's motor centres, right contain nothing but arrangements

hemisphere, according to Paneth. y

—The points of the motor region for representing impressions and

are correlated as follows with-' " " *

mnscies: the loops with the orbi- movements, and other arrangements

culans palpebrarum; the plain . *

crosses twith the flexor, the crosses for coupling the activity O/ these

inscribed in circles with the ex- J Jf "V ^

tensor, digitorum communis of arrangements together. § Currents

the fore-paw; the plain circles °

with the abductor poiiicis pouring in from the sense-organs

longus; the doutle crosses with r 3

the extensor communis of the first excite some arrangements,

hind-limb.

* Pfltiger's Archiv, vol. 37, p. 523 (1885).

f By Lays in his generally preposterous book ' The Brain' ; also by
Horsley.

\ C. Mercier : The Nervous System and the Mind, p. 124.

§ The frontal lobes as yet remain a puzzle. Wundt tries to explain
them as an organ of 'apperception' (Grundzuge d. Pbysiologischen
Psychologic, 3d ed.. vol. i. p. 233 If.), but 1 confess myself unable to appre
hend clearly the Wundtian philosophy so far as this word enters into it. se
must be contented with this bare reference.— Until quite recently it wae

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 65

which in turn excite others, until at last a motor discharge
downwards of some sort occurs. When this is once
clearly grasped there remains little ground for keeping
up that old controversy about the motor zone, as to
whether it is in reality motor or sensitive. The whole
cortex, inasmuch as currents run through it, is both. All
the currents probably have feelings going with them, and
sooner or later bring movements about. In one aspect, then,
every centre is afferent, in another efferent, even the motor
cells of the spinal cord having these two aspects insepara
bly conjoined. Marique,* and Exner and Panethf have
shown that by cutting round a ' motor ' centre and so sepa
rating it from the influence of the rest of the cortex, the
same disorders are produced as by cutting it out, so that
really it is only the mouth of the funnel, as it were,
through which the stream of innervation, starting from else
where, pours ; J consciousness accompanying the stream,
and being mainly of things seen if the stream is strongest
occipitally, of things heard if it is strongest temporally,
of things felt, etc., if the stream occupies most intensely the
'motor zone.' It seems to me that some broad and vague
formulation like this is as much as we can safely venture on
in the present state of science ; and in subsequent chapters
I expect to give confirmatory reasons for my view.

MAN'S CONSCIOUSNESS LIMITED TO THE HEMISPHEBES.

But is the consciousness which accompanies the activity of
the cortex the only consciousness that man has ? or are his lower
centres conscious as well ?

This, is a difficult question to decide, how difficult one
only learns when one discovers that the cortex-conscious
ness itself of certain objects can be seemingly annihilated
in any good hypnotic subject by a bare wave of his opera-
common to talk of an ' ideational centre ' as of something distinct from the
aggregate of other centres. Fortunately this custom is already on the
wane.

* Rech. Exp. sur le Fonctionnement des Centres Psycho-moteurs (Brus
sels, 1885).

f Ptiiiger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 544.

\ I ought to add, however, that Fra^ois-Franck (Fonctious Motrices,
p. 370) got, in two dogs and a cat, a different result from this sort of ' cir
fjumvallation."'

66 PSYCHOLOGY.

tor's hand, and yet be proved by circumstantial evidence to
exist all the while in a split-off condition, quite as ' ejective ' *
to the rest of the subject's mind as that mind is to the mind
of the bystanders, f The lower centres themselves may
conceivably all the while have a split-off consciousness of
their own, similarly ejective to the cortex-consciousness;
but whether they have it or not can never be known from
merely introspective evidence. Meanwhile the fact that
occipital destruction in man may cause a blindness which
is apparently absolute (no feeling remaining either of light
or dark over one half of the field of view), would lead us to
suppose that if our lower optical centres, the corpora
quadrigemina, and thalami, do have any consciousness, it
is at all events a consciousness which does not mix with
that which accompanies the cortical activities, and which
has nothing to do with our personal Self. In lower
animals this may not be so much the case. The traces of
sight found (supra, p. 46) in dogs and monkeys whose occip
ital lobes were entirely destroyed, may possibly have been
due to the fact that the lower centres of these animals saw,
and that what they saw was not ejective but objective to
the remaining cortex, i.e. it formed part of one and the
same inner world with the things which that cortex per
ceived. It may be, however, that the phenomena were due
to the fact that in these animals the cortical ' centres ' for
vision reach outside of the occipital zone, and that destruc
tion of the latter fails to remove them as completely as in
man. This, as we know, is the opinion of the experiment
ers themselves. For practical purposes, nevertheless, and
limiting the meaning of the word consciousness to the per
sonal self of the individual, we can pretty confidently answer
the question prefixed to this paragraph by saying that the
cortex is the sole organ of consciousness in man.$ If there

* For this word, see T. K. Clifford's Lectures and Essays (1879), vol. n.
p. 72.

f See below, Chapter VIII.

\ Cf. Ferrier's Functions, pp. 120, 147, 414. See also Vulpian: Le9ons
sur la Physiol. du Syst. Nerveux, p. 548; Luciani u. Seppili, op. cit. pp.
404-5; H. Maudsley: Physiology of Mind (1876), pp. 138 ff., 197 ff., and
241 ff. In G. H. Lewes's Physical Basis of Mind, Problem IV: ' The Reflex
Theory/ a very full history of the question is given.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 67

be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is
a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.

THE RESTITUTION OF FUNCTION".

Another problem, not so metaphysical, remains. The
most general and striking fact connected with cortical in
jury is that of the restoration of function. Functions lost at
first are after a few days or weeks restored. How are ive
to understand this restitution ?

Two theories are in the field :

1) Restitution is due to the vicarious action either of the
rest of the cortex or of centres lower down, acquiring func
tions which until then they had not performed ;

2) It is due to the remaining centres (whether cortical or
'lower') resuming functions which they had always had,
but of which the wound had temporarily inhibited the
exercise. This is the view of which Goltz and Brown-
Sequard are the most distinguished defenders.

Inhibition is a vera causa, of that there can be no doubt.
The pneumogastric nerve inhibits the heart, the splanch
nic inhibits the intestinal movements, and the superior
laryngeal those of inspiration. The nerve-irritations which
may inhibit the contraction of arterioles are innumerable,
and reflex actions are often repressed by the simultaneous
excitement of other sensory nerves. For all such facts the
reader must consult the treatises on physiology. "What
concerns us here is the inhibition exerted by different parts
of ^ne nerve-centres, when irritated, on the activity of dis
tant parts. The naccidity of a frog from ' shock,' for a,
minute or so after his medulla oblongata is cut, is an in
hibition from the seat of injury which quickly passes away.

What is known as ' surgical shock ' (unconsciousness,
pallor, dilatation of splanchnic blood-vessels, and general
syncope and collapse) in the human subject is an inhibition
which lasts a longer time. Goltz, Freusberg, and others,
cutting the spinal cord in dogs, proved that there were
functions inhibited still longer by the wound, but which re
established themselves ultimately if the animal was kept
alive. The lumbar region of the cord was thus found to
contain independent vase-motor centres, centres for erec-

68 PSYCHOLOGY.

tion, for control of the sphincters, etc., which could be
excited to activity by tactile stimuli and as readily reinhib-
ited by others simultaneously applied.* "We may therefore
plausibly suppose that the rapid reappearance of motility,
vision, etc., after their first disappearance in consequence
of a cortical mutilation, is due to the passing off of
inhibitions exerted by the irritated surface of the wound.
The only question is whether all restorations of function
must be explained in this one simple way, or whether some
part of them may not be owing to the formation of entirely
uew paths in the remaining centres, by which they become
' educated ' to duties which they did not originally possess.
In favor of an indefinite extension of the inhibition theory
facts may be cited such as the following : In dogs whose dis
turbances due to cortical lesion have disappeared, they may
in consequence of some inner or outer accident reappear in all
their intensity for 24 hours or so and then disappear again, f
In a dog made half blind by an operation, and then shut
up in the dark, vision comes back just as quickly as in
other similar dogs whose sight is exercised systematically
every day4 A dog which has learned to beg before the
operation recommences this practice quite spontaneously
a week after a double-sided ablation of the motor zone.§
Occasionally, in a pigeon (or even, it is said, in a dog)
we see the disturbances less marked immediately after
the operation than they are half an hour later. | This
would be impossible were they due to the subtraction of the
organs which normally carried them on. Moreover the
entire drift of recent physiological and pathological specu
lation is towards enthroning inhibition as an ever-present
and indispensable condition of orderly activity. We shall
see how great is its importance, in the chapter on the "Will.
Mr. Charles Mercier considers that no muscular contraction,
once begun, would ever stop without it, short of exhaustion

* Goltz : Pfltiger's Archiv, vol. 8, p. 460; Freusberg: ibid. vol. 10, p. 174

f Goltz : Verrichtungen des Grosshirns, p. 78.

$ Loeb : Pfltiger's Archiv, vol. 89, p. 276.

§ Ibid. p. 289.

|| Schrader : ibid. vol. 44, p. 21&

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 69

of the system ; * and Brown-Sequard has for years been
accumulating examples to show how far its influence ex
tends, f Under these circumstances it seems as if error
might more probably lie in curtailing its sphere too much
than in stretching it too far as an explanation of the
phenomena following cortical lesion. J

On the other hand, if we admit no re-education of cen
tres, we not only fly in the face of an a priori probability,
but we find ourselves compelled by facts to suppose an
almost incredible number of functions natively lodged in the
centres below the thalami or even in those below the corpora
quadrigemina. I will consider the a priori objection after
first taking a look at the facts which I have in mind. They
confront us the moment we ask ourselves just which are the
parts ivhich perform the functions abolished by an operation
after sufficient time has elapsed for restoration to occur ?

The first observers thought that they must be the cor
responding parts of the opposite or intact hemisphere. But as
long ago as 1875 Carville and Duret tested this by cutting
out the fore-leg-centre on one side, in a dog, and then, after
waiting till restitution had occurred, cutting it out on the
opposite side as well. Goltz and others have done the
same thing. § If the opposite side were really the seat of the
restored function, the original palsy should have appeared
again and been permanent. But it did not appear at all ;
there appeared only a palsy of the hitherto unaffected side.
The next supposition is that the parts surrounding the cut-out
region learn vicariously to perform its duties. But here,
again, experiment seems to upset the hypothesis, so far as
the motor zone goes at least ; for we may wait till motility
has returned in the affected limb, and then both irritate the

* The Nervous System and the Mind (1888), chaps, in, vi; also in
Brain, vol. xi. p. 361.

f Brown-Sequard has given a resume of his opinions in the Archives
de Physiologic for Oct. 1889, 5rne. Serie, vol. I. p 751.

\ Goltz first applied the inhibition theory to the brain in his ' Verrich-
tungen des Grosshirns,' p. 39 ff. On the general philosophy of Inhibition
the reader may consult Brunton's ' Pharmakology and Therapeutics,1
p. 154 ff., and also ' Nature/ vol. 27, p. 419 ff.

§ E.g. Herzen, Herman u. Schwalbe's Jahres-bericht for 1886, PhysioL
AJbth. p. 38. (Experiments on new-born puppies.?

70 PSYCHOLOGY.

cortex surrounding the wound without exciting the limb
to movement, and ablate it, without bringing back the
vanished palsy.* It would accordingly seem that the cere
bral centres below the cortex must be the seat of the regained
activities. But Goltz destroyed a dog's entire left hemi
sphere, together with the corpus striatum and the thalamus
on that side, and kept him alive until a surprisingly small
amount of motor and tactile disturbance remained.t These
centres cannot here have accounted for the restitution. He
has even, as it would appear, J ablated both the hemispheres
of a dog, and kept him alive 51 days, able to walk and stand.
The corpora striata and thalami in this dog were also prac
tically gone. In view of such results we seem driven, with
M. Francois-Franck,§ to fall back on the ganglia lower still,
or even on the spinal cord as the ' vicarious ' organ of which
we are in quest. If the abeyance of function between the
operation and the restoration was due exclusively to inhibi
tion, then we must suppose these lowest centres to be in
reality extremely accomplished organs. They must always
have done what we now find them doing after function is
restored, even when the hemispheres were intact. Of
course this is conceivably the case ; yet it does not seem
very plausible. And the a priori considerations which a
moment since I said I should urge, make it less plausible
still.

For, in the first place, the brain is essentially a place of
currents, which run in organized paths. Loss of function
can only mean one of two things, either that a current can
no longer run in, or that if it runs in, it can no longer run
out, by its old path. Either of these inabilities may come
from a local ablation; and ' restitution ' can then only mean
that, in spite of a temporary block, an inrunning current has
at last become enabled to flow out by its old path again —
e.g., the sound of ' give your paw ' discharges after some

* Fran9ois-Franck : op. cit. p. 382. Results are somewhat contradictory.

t Pfluger's Archiv, vol. 42, p. 419.

j Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1889, p. 372.

§ Op. cit. p. 387. See pp. 378 to 388 for a discussion of the whole
question. Compare also Wundt's Physiol. Psych., 3d ed., i. 225 ff., and
Luciani u. Seppili, pp. 243, 293.

FUNCTIONS OP THE BRAIN. 71

weeks into the same canine muscles into which it used to
discharge before the operation. As far as the cortex itself
goes, since one of the purposes for which it actually exists
is the production of new paths/ the only question before
us is : Is the formation of these particular ' vicarious ' paths
too much to expect of its plastic powers ? It would cer
tainly be too much to expect that a hemisphere should
receive currents from optic fibres whose arriving -place with
in it is destroyed, or that it should discharge into fibres of
the pyramidal strand if their place of exit is broken down.
Such lesions as these must be irreparable ivithin that
hemisphere. Yet even then, through the other hemisphere,
the corpus callosum, and the bilateral connections in the
spinal cord, one can imagine some road by which the old
muscles might eventually be innervated by the same in
coming currents which innervated them before the block.
And for all minor interruptions, not involving the arriving-
place of the 'cortico-petal' or the place of exit of the 'cortico-
fugal ' fibres, roundabout paths of some sort through the
affected hemisphere itself must exist, for every point of it
is, remotely at least, in potential communication with every
other point. The normal paths are only paths of least
resistance. If they get blocked or cut, paths formerly more
resistant become the least resistant paths under the changed
conditions. It must never be forgotten that a current that
runs in has got to run out somewhere ; and if it only once
succeeds by accident in striking into its old place of exit
again, the thrill of satisfaction which the consciousness
connected with the whole residual brain then receives wil]
reinforce and fix the paths of that moment and make them
more likely to be struck into again. The resultant feeling
that the old habitual act is at last successfully back again,
becomes itself a new stimulus which stamps all the exist
ing currents in. It is matter of experience that such feel
ings of successful achievement do tend to fix in our memory
whatever processes have led to them ; and we shall have

* The Chapters on Habit, Association, Memory, and Perception will
change our present preliminary conjecture that that is one of its essential
uses, into an unshakable conviction.

72 PSYCHOLOGY.

a good deal more to say upon the subject when we come to
the Chapter on the Will.

My conclusion then is this : that some of the restitution
of function (especially where the cortical lesion is not too
great) is probably due to genuinely vicarious function on
the p'irt of the centres that remain ; whilst some of it
is due to the passing off of inhibitions. In other words,
both the vicarious theory and the inhibition theory are
true in their measure. But as for determining that measure,
or saying which centres are vicarious, and to what extent
they can learn new tricks, that is impossible at present.

FINAL CORRECTION OP THE MEYNERT SCHEME.

And now, after learning all these facts, what are we to
think of the child and the candle-flame, and of that scheme
which provisionally imposed itself on our acceptance after
surveying the actions of the frog ? (Cf. pp. 25-6, supra.) It
will be remembered that we then considered the lower cen
tres en masse as machines for responding to present sense-
impressions exclusively, and the hemispheres as equally
exclusive organs oi action from inward considerations or
ideas ; and that, following Meynert, we supposed the hemi
spheres to have no native tendencies to determinate activity,
but to be merely superadded organs for breaking up the
various reflexes performed by the lower centres, and com
bining their motor and sensory elements in novel ways. It
will also be remembered that I prophesied that we should
be obliged to soften down the sharpness of this distinction
after we had completed our survey of the farther facts.
The time has now come for that correction to be made.

Wider and completer observations show us both that the
lower centres are more spontaneous, and that the hemi
spheres are more automatic, than the Meynert scheme
allows. Schrader's observations in Goltz's Laboratory on
hemisphereless frogs* and pigeons f give an idea quite
different from the picture of these creatures which is
classically current. Steiner's J observations on frogs

* Pfltiger's Archiv, vol. 41, p. 75 (1887). \lbid., vol. 44, p. 175 (1889)
% Untersuchuugeii liber die Physiologic des Froschhirns. 1885.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 73

already went a good way in the same direction, showing,
for example, that locomotion is a well-developed function
of the medulla oblongata. But Schrader, by great care
in the operation, and by keeping the frogs a long time alive,
found that at least in some of them the spinal cord would
produce movements of locomotion when the frog was
smartly roused by a poke, and that swimming and croaking
could sometimes be performed when nothing above the
medulla oblongata remained.* Schrader's hemisphereless
frogs moved spontaneously, ate flies, buried themselves
in the ground, and in short did many things which before
his observations were supposed to be impossible unless the
hemispheres remained. Steinerf and Yulpian have re
marked an even greater vivacity in fishes deprived of their
hemispheres. Vulpian says of his brainless carps:): that
three days after the operation one of them darted at food
and at a knot tied on the end of a string, holding the latter so
tight between his jaws that his head was drawn out of
water. Later, "they see morsels of white of egg; the
moment these sink through the water in front of them,
they follow and seize them, sometimes after they are on the
bottom, sometimes before they have reached it. In captur
ing and swallowing this food they execute just the same
movements as the intact carps which are in the same aqua
rium. The only difference is that they seem to see them at
less distance, seek them with less impetuosity and less per
severance in all the points of the bottom of the aquarium,
but they struggle (so to speak) sometimes with the sound
carps to grasp the morsels. It is certain that they do not
confound these bits of white of egg with other white bodies,
small pebbles for example, which are at the bottom of the
water. The same carp which, three days after operation,
seized the knot on a piece of string, no longer snaps at it
now, but if one brings it near her, she draws away from it
by swimming backwards before it comes into contact with

* LOG. cit. pp. 80, 82-3. Schrader also found a biting-rettex developed
when the medulla oblongata is cut through just behind the cerebellum,
f Berlin Akad. Sitzungsberichte for 1886.
j Comptes Rendus, vol. 102, p. 90.

74 PSYCHOLOGY.

her mouth."* Already on pp. 9-10, as the reader may re*
member, we instanced those adaptations of conduct to ne^
conditions, on the part of the frog's spinal cord and thalami,
which led Pfliiger and Lewes on the one hand and Goltz on
the other to locate in these organs an intelligence akin to
that of which the hemispheres are the seat.

When it comes to birds deprived of their hemispheres,
the evidence that some of their acts have conscious purpose
behind them is quite as persuasive. In pigeons Schrader
found that the state of somnolence lasted only three or four
days, after which time the birds began indefatigably to
walk about the room. They climbed out of boxes in which
they were put, jumped over or flew up upon obstacles, and
their sight was so perfect that neither in walking nor flying
did they ever strike any object in the room. They had
also definite ends or purposes, flying straight for more
convenient perching places when made uncomfortable by
movements imparted to those on which they stood ; and of
several possible perches they always chose the most con
venient. "If we give the dove the choice of a horizontal
bar (Recti) or an equally distant table to fly to, she always
gives decided preference to the table. Indeed she chooses
the table even if it is several meters farther off than the bar
or the chair." Placed on the back of a chair, she flies first
to the seat and then to the floor, and in general " will for
sake a high position, although it give her sufficiently firm
support, and in order to reach the ground will make use of
the environing objects as intermediate goals of flight, show
ing a perfectly correct judgment of their distance. Although
able to fly directly to the ground, she prefers to make the
journey in successive stages. . . . Once on the ground, she
hardly ever rises spontaneously into the air." f

Young rabbits deprived of their hemispheres will stand,
run, start at noises, avoid obstacles in their path, and give
responsive cries of suffering when hurt. Eats will do the
same, and throw themselves moreover into an attitude of
defence. Dogs never survive such an operation if per
formed at once. But Goltz's latest dog, mentioned on p.

* Comptes Rendus de 1'Acad. d. Sciences, vol. 102, p. 1530.
f Loc. cit. p. 216.

FUNCTIONS Of THE BRAIN. 75

70, which is said to have been kept alive for fifty-one days
after both hemispheres had been removed by a series of
ablations and the corpora striata and thalami had softened
away, shows how much the mid-brain centres and the cord
can do even in the canine species. Taken together, the
number of reactions shown to exist in the lower centres by
these observations make out a pretty good case for the Mey-
nert scheme, as applied to these lower animals. That
scheme demands hemispheres which shall be mere supple
ments or organs of repetition, and in the light of these
observations they obviously are so to a great extent. But
the Meynert scheme also demands that the reactions of the
lower centres shall all be native, and we are not absolutely
sure that some of those which we have been considering
may not have been acquired after the injury ; and it further
more demands that they should be machine-like, whereas
the expression of some of them makes us doubt whether
they may not be guided by an intelligence of low degree.

Even in the lower animals, then, there is reason to soften
down that opposition between the hemispheres and the
lower centres which the scheme demands. The hemi
spheres may, it is true, only supplement the lower centres,
but the latter resemble the former in nature and have
some small amount at least of ' spontaneity ' and choice.

But when we come to monkeys and man the scheme
well-nigh breaks down altogether; for we find that the
hemispheres do not simply repeat voluntarily actions which
the lower centres perform as machines. There are many
functions which the lower centres cannot by themselves
perform at all. When the motor cortex is injured in a man
or a monkey genuine paralysis ensues, which in man is
incurable, and almost or quite equally so in the ape. Dr.
Seguin knew a man with hemi-blindness, from cortical
injury, which had persisted unaltered for twenty-three
years. 'Traumatic inhibition' cannot possibly account
for this. The blindness must have been an ' Ausfallser-
scheinung,' due to the loss of vision's essential organ. It
would seem, then, that in these higher creatures the lower
centres must be less adequate than they are farther down
in the zoological scale ; and that even for certain elementary

76 PSYCHOLOGY.

combinations of movement and impression the co-operation
of the hemispheres is necessary from the start. Even in
birds and dogs the power of eating properly is lost when
the frontal lobes are cut off.*

The plain truth is that neither in man nor beast are the
hemispheres the virgin organs which our scheme called
them. So far from being unorganized at birth, they must
have native tendencies to reaction of a determinate sort.f
These are the tendencies which we know as emotions and
instincts, and which we must study with some detail in later
chapters of this book. Both instincts and emotions are reac
tions upon special sorts of objects of perception; they de
pend on the hemispheres ; and they are in the first instance
reflex, that is, they take place the first time the exciting ob
ject is met, are accompanied by no forethought or delibera
tion, and are irresistible. But they are modifiable to a
certain extent by experience, and on later occasions of
meeting the exciting object, the instincts especially have
less of the blind impulsive character which they had at
first. All this will be explained at some length in Chapter
XXIV. Meanwhile we can say that the multiplicity of emo
tional and instinctive reactions in man, together with his
extensive associative power, permit of extensive recouplings
of the original sensory and motor partners. The conse
quences of one instinctive reaction often prove to be the
inciters of an opposite reaction, and being suggested on later
occasions by the original object, may then suppress the
first reaction altogether, just as in the case of the child and
the flame. For this education the hemispheres do not need

* Goltz: Ptiflger's Archiv, vol. 42, p. 447 ; Schrader: ibid. vol. 44, p.
219 ff . It is possible that this symptom may be an effect of traumatic
inhibition, however.

f A few years ago one of the strongest arguments for the theory that
the hemispheres are purely supernumerary was Soltmann's often-quoted
observation that in new-born puppies the motor zone of the cortex is not
excitable by electricity and only becomes so in the course of a fortnight,
presumably after the experiences of the lower centres have educated it to
motor duties. Paneth's later observations, however, seem to show that
Soltmann may have been misled through overnarcotizing his victims
(Pfltiger's Archiv, vol. 37, p. 202). In the Neurologisches Centralblatt
for 1889, p. 513, Bechterew returns to the subject on Soltmann's side with
out, however, noticing Paneth's work.

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 77

to be tabulae rasce at first, as the Meynert scheme would
have them ; and so far from their being educated by the
lower centres exclusively, they educate themselves.*

We have already noticed the absence of reactions from
fear and hunger in the ordinary brainless frog. Schrader
gives a striking account of the instinctless condition of his
brainless pigeons, active as they were in the way of loco
motion and voice. " The hemisphereless animal moves in a
world of bodies which . . . are all of equal, value for him. . . .
He is, to use Goltz's apt expression, impersonal . . . Every
object is for him only a space-occupying mass, he turns out
of his path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for a
stone. He may try to climb over both. All authors agree
that they never found any difference, whether it was an in
animate body, a cat, a dog, or a bird of prey which came in
their pigeon's way. The creature knows neither friends
nor enemies, in the thickest company it lives like a hermit.
The languishing cooing of the male awakens no more im
pression than the rattling of the peas, or the call-whistle
which in the days before the injury used to make the birds
hasten to be fed. Quite as little as the earlier observers
have I seen hemisphereless she-birds answer the courting
of the male. A hemisphereless male will coo all day long
and show distinct signs of sexual excitement, but his activ
ity is without any object, it is entirely indifferent to him
whether the she-bird be there or not. If one is placed near
him, he leaves her unnoticed. ... As the male pays no at
tention to the female, so she pays none to her young. The
brood may follow the mother ceaselessly calling for food,
but they might as well ask it from a stone. . . . The hemi-

* Milnsterberg (Die Willenshaudlung, 1888, p. 134) challenges Meynert's
scheme in toto, saying that whilst we have in our personal experience
plenty of examples of acts which were at first voluntary becoming second
arily automatic and reflex, we have no conscious record of a single origi
nally reflex act growing voluntary. — As far as conscious record is concerned,
we could not possibly have it even if the Meynert scheme were wholly true,
for the education of the hemispheres which that schesra postulates must
in the nature of things antedate recollection. Bit it s^oa to me that
Munsterberg's rejection of the scheme may pcsaibl/ be correct as regards
reflexes from the lower centres. Everywhere in this department 0* P«v
chogenesis we are made to feel how ignorant wt, really an,.

78 PSYCHOLOGY.

Bphereless pigeon is in the highest degree tame, and fears
man as little as cat or bird of prey." *

Putting together now all the facts and reflections which
we have been through, it seems to me that we can no longer
hold strictly to the Meynert scheme. If anywhere, it will
apply to the lowest animals ; but in them especially the
lower centres seem to have a degree of spontaneity and
choice. On the whole, I think that we are driven to sub
stitute for it some such general conception as the following,
which allows for zoological differences as we know them,
and is vague and elastic enough to receive any number of
future discoveries of detail.

CONCLUSION.

All the centres, in all animals, whilst they are in one
aspect mechanisms, probably are, or at least once were,
organs of consciousness in another, although the conscious
ness is doubtless much more developed in the hemispheres
than it is anywhere else. The consciousness must every
where prefer some of the sensations which it gets to others ;
and if it can remember these in their absence, however
dimly, they must be its ends of desire. If, moreover, it can
identify in memory any motor discharges which may have
led to such ends, and associate the latter with them, then
these motor discharges themselves may in turn become
desired as means. This is the development of will ; and its
realization must of course be proportional to the possible
complication of the consciousness. Even the spinal cord
may possibly have some little power of will in this sense,
and of effort towards modified behavior in consequence of
new experiences of sensibility, f

* Pfltiger's Archiv, vol. 44, p. 230-1.

f Naturally, as Schiff long ago pointed out (Lehrb. d. Muskel-u. Ner«
venphysiologie, 1859, p. 213 ff.),the 'Riickenmarksseele,' if it now exist,
can have no higher sense-consciousness, for its incoming currents are
solely from the skin. But it may, in its dim way, both feel, prefer, and
desire. See, for the view favorable to the text: G. H. Lewes, The Physiol
ogy of Common Life (1860), chap. ix. Goltz (Nervencentren des Frosches
1869, pp. 102-130) thinks that the frog's cord has no adaptative power. This
may be the case in such experiments as his, because the beheaded frog'a

FUNCTIONS OF THE BRAIN. 79

All nervous centres have then in the first instance one
essential function, that of 'intelligent' action. They feel,
prefer one thing to another, and have 'ends.' Like all
other organs, however, they evolve from ancestor to descend
ant, and their evolution takes two directions, the lower
centres passing downwards into more unhesitating autom
atism, and the higher ones upwards into larger intellectu
ality.* Thus it may happen that those functions which
can safely grow uniform and fatal become least accompanied
by mind, and that their organ, the spinal cord, becomes a
more and more soulless machine; whilst on the contrary
those functions which it benefits the animal to have adapted
to delicate environing variations pass more and more to the
hemispheres, whose anatomical structure and attendant
consciousness grow more and more elaborate as zoological
evolution proceeds. In this way it might come about that
in man and the monkeys the basal ganglia should do fewer
things by themselves than they can do in dogs, fewer in dogs
than in rabbits, fewer in rabbits than in hawks, f fewer in
hawks than in pigeons, fewer in pigeons than in frogs, fewer
in frogs than in fishes, and that the hemispheres should
correspondingly do more. This passage of functions for
ward to the ever-enlarging hemispheres would be itself one
of the evolutive changes, to be explained like the develop
ment of the hemispheres themselves, either by fortunate
variation or by inherited effects of use. The reflexes, on
this view, upon which the education of our human hemi
spheres depends, would not be due to the basal ganglia

short span of life does not give it time to learn the new tricks asked for.
But Rosenthal (Biologisches Centralblatt, vol. iv. p. 247) and Mendelssohn
(Berlin Akad. Sitzuugsberichte, 1885, p. 107) in their investigations on the
simple reflexes of the frog's cord, show that there is some adaptation to new
conditions, inasmuch as when usual paths of conduction are interrupted by
a cut, new paths are taken. According to Rosenthal, these grow more
pervious (i.e. require a smaller stimulus) in proportion as they are more
often traversed.

* Whether this evolution takes place through the inheritance of habits
acquired, or through the preservation of lucky variations, is an alternative
which we need not discuss here. We shall consider it in the last chapter
in the book. For our present purpose the modus operandi of the evolution
makes no difference, provided it be admitted to occur.

f See Schrader's Observations, loc. cit.

80 PSYCHOLOGY.

alone. They would be tendencies in the hemispheres them*
selves, modifiable by education, unlike the reflexes of the
medulla oblongata, pons, optic lobes and spinal cord. Such
cerebral reflexes, if they exist, form a basis quite as good
as that which the Meynert scheme offers, for the acquisition
of memories and associations which may later result in all
sorts of ' changes of partners ' in the psychic world. The
diagram of the baby and the candle (see page 25) can be
re-edited, if need be, as an entirely cortical transaction.
The original tendency to touch will be a cortical instinct ;
the burn will leave an image in another part of the cortex,
which, being recalled by association, will inhibit the touch
ing tendency the next time the candle is perceived, and
excite the tendency to withdraw — so that the retinal picture
will, upon that next time, be coupled with the original
motor partner of the pain. We thus get whatever psycho
logical truth the Meynert scheme possesses without en
tangling ourselves on a dubious anatomy and physiology.

Some such shadowy view of the evolution of the centres,
of the relation of consciousness to them, and of the hemi
spheres to the other lobes, is, it seems to me, that in which
it is safest to indulge. If it has no other advantage, it at
any rate makes us realize how enormous are the gaps in our
knowledge, the moment we try to cover the facts by any
one formula of a general kind.

CHAPTER III.
ON SOME GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY.

THE elementary properties of nerve-tissue on which
the brain-functions depend are far from being satisfactorily
made out. The scheme that suggests itself in the first
instance to the mind, because it is so obvious, is certainly
false: I mean the notion that each cell stands for an idea
or part of an idea, and that the ideas are associated or
'bound into bundles' (to use a phrase of Locke's) by the
fibres. If we make a symbolic diagram on a blackboard,
of the laws of association between ideas, we are inevitably
led to draw circles, or closed figures of some kind, and to
connect them by lines. When we hear that the nerve-cen
tres contain cells which send off fibres, we say that Nature
has realized our diagram for us, and that the mechanical
substratum of thought is plain. In some way, it is true, oui
diagram must be realized in the brain ; but surely in no
such visible and palpable way as we at first suppose.* An
enormous number of the cellular bodies in the hemispheres
are fibreless. Where fibres are sent off they soon divide into
untraceable ramifications ; and nowhere do we see a simple
coarse anatomical connection, like a line on the black
board, between two cells. Too much anatomy has been
found to order for theoretic purposes, even by the anat
omists ; and the popular-science notions of cells and fibres
are almost wholly wide of the truth. Let us therefore rele
gate the subject of the intimate workings of the brain to

* I shall myself in later places indulge in much of this schematization.
The reader will understand once for all that it is symbolic; and that the
use of it is hardly more than to show what a deep congruity there is between
mental processes and mechanical processes of some kind, not necessarily p*
the exact kind portrayed.

81

82 PSYCHOLOGY.

the physiology of the future, save in respect to a few points
of which a word must now be said. And first of

THE SUMMATION OF STIMULI

in the same nerve-tract. This is a property extremely im
portant for the understanding of a great many phenomena
of the neural, and consequently of the mental, life ; and it
behooves us to gain a clear conception of what it means be
fore we proceed any farther.

The law is this, that a stimuli^ which itiould be inadequate by
itself to excite a nerve-centre to effective discharge may, by acting
ivith one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselves
alone) bring the discharge about. The natural way to con
sider this is as a summation of tensions which at last over
come a resistance. The first of them produce a 'latent
excitement ' or a ' heightened irritability ' — the phrase is
immaterial so far as practical consequences go ; the last is
the straw which breaks the camel's back. Where the
neural process is one that has consciousness for its accom
paniment, the final explosion would in all cases seem to
involve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantive
kind. But there is no ground for supposing that the ten
sions whilst yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, may
not also have a share in determining the total conscious
ness present in the individual at the time. In later
chapters we shall see abundant reason to suppose that they
do have such a share, and that without their contribution
the fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital in
gredient of the mind's object, would not come to conscious
ness at all.

The subject belongs too much to physiology for the
evidence to be cited in detail in these pages. I will throw
into a note a few references for such readers as may be in>
terested in following it out,* and simply say that the direct
* Valentin: Archiv f. d. gesanimt. Physiol., 1873, p. 458. Stirling:
Leipzig Acad. Berichte, 1875, p. 372 (Journal of Physiol., 1875). J
Ward : Archiv f. (Anut. u.) Physiol., 1880, p. 72. H. Sewall : Johns
Hopkins Studies, 1880, p. 30. Kronecker u. Nicolaides : Archiv f.
(Anat. u.) Physiol., 1880, p. 437. Exner : Archiv f. die ges. Physiol., Bd.
28, p. 487 (1882). Eckhard : in Hermann's Hdbch. d. Physiol., Bd. i/Thl.'
u. p. 31. Frangors-Franck : Lecons sur les Fonctions tuotrices du Cer-

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 83

electrical irritation of the cortical centres sufficiently proves
the point. For it was found by the earliest experimenters
here that whereas it takes an exceedingly strong current
to produce any movement when a single induction-shock
is used, a rapid succession of induction-shocks (' faradiza
tion ') will produce movements when the current is com
paratively weak. A single quotation from an excellent
investigation will exhibit this law under further aspects :

" If wo continue to stimulate the cortex at short intervals with the
strength of current which produces the minimal muscular contrac
tion [of the dog's digital extensor muscle], the amount of contraction
gradually increases till it reaches the maximum. Each earlier stimula
tion leaves thus an effect behind it, which increases the efficacy of the
following one. In this summation of the stimuli .... the following
points may be noted : 1) Single stimuli entirely inefficacious when
alone may become efficacious by sufficiently rapid reiteration. If the
current used is very much less than that which provokes the first begin
ning of contraction, a very large number of successive shocks may be
needed before the movement appears — 20, 50, once 106 shocks were
needed. 2) The summation takes place easily in proportion to the
shortness of the interval between the stimuli. A current too weak to
give effective summation when its shocks are 3 seconds apart will be
capable of so doing when the interval is shortened to 1 second. 3)
Not only electrical irritation leaves a modification which goes to swell
the following stimulus, but every sort of irritant which can produce a
contraction does so. If in any way a reflex contraction of the muscle
experimented on has been produced, or if it is contracted spontaneously
by the animal (as not unfrequently happens 'by sympathy,' during a
deep inspiration), it is found that an electrical stimulus, until then
inoperative, operates energetically if immediately applied." *

Furthermore :

"In a certain stage of the morphia-narcosis an ineffectively weak
shock will become powerfully effective, if, immediately before its appli-

veau, p. 51 ft'., 339.— For the process of summation in nerves and muscles,
cf. Hermann: ibid. Thl. i. p. 109, and vol. i. p. 40. Also Wundt:
Physiol. Psych. , i. 243 ff . ; Ricliet : Travaux du Laboratoire de Marey, 1877,
p. 97 ; L'Homme et 1'Intelligence, pp. 24 ff., 468 ; Revue Philosophique,
t. xxi. p. 564. Kronecker u. Hall: Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1879;
Schoulein : ibid. 1882, p. 357. Sertoli (Hofinann and Schwalbe's Jahres-
bericht, 1882. p. 25. De Watteville : Neurologisches Ceutralblatt, 1883,
No. 7. Grilnhagen : Arch. f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 34, p. 301 (1884).

*Bubnoff und Heidenhain : UeberErreguugs- uncl Hemmmigsvorgauge
innerhalb der motorisclieii Hirucentren. Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd.
26, p. 156(1881).

84 PSYCHOLOGY.

cation to the motor centre, the skin of certain parts of the body is
exposed to gentle tactile stimulation. ... If, having ascertained the
subminimal strength of current and convinced one's self repeatedly of its
inefficacy, we draw our hand a single time lightly over the skin of the
paw whose cortical centre is the object of stimulation, we find the cur
rent at once strongly effective. The increase of irritability lasts some
seconds before it disappears. Sometimes th 3 effect of a single light
stroking of the paw is only sufficient to make the previously ineffectual
current produce a very weak contraction. Repeating the tactile stimu
lation will then, as a rule, increase the contraction's extent." *

We constantly use the summation of stimuli in our
practical appeals. If a car-horse balks, the final way of
starting him is by applying a number of customary incite
ments at once. If the driver uses reins and voice, if one
bystander pulls at his head, another lashes his hind
quarters, and the conductor rings the bell, and the dis
mounted passengers shove the car, all at the same moment,
his obstinacy generally yields, and he goes on his way re
joicing. If we are striving to remember a lost name or fact,
we think of as many ' cues ' as possible, so that by their
joint action they may recall what no one of them can recall
alone. The sight of a dead prey will often not stimulate a
beast to pursuit, but if the sight of movement be added to
that of form, pursuit occurs. " Briicke noted that his brain
less hen, which made no attempt to peck at the grain under
her very eyes, began pecking if the grain were thrown on
the ground with force, so as to produce a rattling sound." t
"Dr. Allen Thomson hatched out some chickens on a carpet,
where he kept them for several days. They showed no in
clination to scrape, . . . but when Dr. Thomson sprinkled
a little gravel on the carpet, . . . the chickens immediately
began their scraping movements." J A strange person, and
darkness, are both of them stimuli to fear and mistrust in
dogs (and for the matter of that, in men). Neither circum-

* Archiv f. d. ges. Physiol., Bd. 26, p. 176 (1881). Exner thinks (ibid.
Bd. 28, p. 497 (1882) ) that the summation here occurs in the spinal cord.
It makes no difference where this particular summation occurs, so far as
the general philosophy of summation ?oes.

f G H. Lewes : Physical Basis of Mind, p. 479, where many similar
examples are given, 487-9.

t Romanes : Mental Evolution In Animals, p. 168.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN- ACTIVITY. 85

stance alone may awaken outward manifestations, but to
gether, i.e. when the strange man is met in the dark, the dog
will be excited to violent defiance. * Street-hawkers well
know the efficacy of summation, for they arrange themselves
in a line upon the sidewalk, and the passer often buys from
the last one of them, through the effect of the reiterated so
licitation, what he refused to buy from the first in tne row.
Aphasia shows many examples of summation. A patient
who cannot name an object simply shown him, will name it
if he touches as well as sees it, etc.

Instances of summation might be multiplied indefinitely,
but it is hardly worth while to forestall subsequent chapters.
Those on Instinct, the Stream of Thought, Attention, Dis
crimination, Association, Memory, ^Esthetics, and Will, will
contain numerous exemplifications of the reach of the prin
ciple in the purely psychological field.

REACTION-TIME.

One of the lines of experimental investigation most
diligently followed of late years is that of the ascertain
ment of the time occupied by nervous events. Helmholtz led
off by discovering the rapidity of the current in the sciatic
nerve of the frog. But the methods he used were soon
applied to the sensory nerves and the centres, and the
results caused much popular scientific admiration when
described as measurements of the ' velocity of thought.'
The phrase ' quick as thought ' had from time immemorial
signified all that was wonderful and elusive of determina
tion in the line of speed ; and the way in which Science
laid her doomful hand upon this mystery reminded people
of the day when Franklin first ' eripuit ccelo fulmen,' fore-

* See a similar instance in Mach : Beitrage zur Analyse der Empfin-
dungen, p. 36, a sparrow being the animal. My young children are afraid
of their own pug-dog, if he enters their room after they are in bed and the
lights are out. Compare this statement also : " The first question to a
peasant seldom proves more than a flapper to rouse the torpid adjustments
of his ears. The invariable answer of a Scottish peasant is, 'What's your
wull? ' — that of the English, a vacant stare. A second and even a third
question may be required to elicit an answer." (R. Fowler: Some Obser
vations on the Mental State of the Blind, and Deaf, and Dumb (Salisbury,
1843), p. 14.)

86 PSYCHOLOGY.

shadowing the reign of a newer and colder race of gods,
We shall take up the various operations measured, each in
the chapter to which it more naturally pertains. I may
say, however, immediately, that the phrase ' velocity of
thought ' is misleading, for it is by no means clear in any
of the cases what particular act of thought occurs during
the time which is measured. ' Velocity of nerve-action ' is
liable to the same criticism, for in most cases we do not know
what particular nerve-processes occur. What the times
in question really represent is the total duration of certain
reactions upon stimuli. Certain of the conditions of the reac
tion are prepared beforehand ; they consist in the assump
tion of those motor and sensory tensions which we name
the expectant state. Just what happens during the actual
time occupied by the reaction (in other words, just what
is added to the pre-existent tensions to produce the actual
discharge) is not made out at present, either from the
neural or from the mental point of view.

The method is essentially the same in all these investiga
tions. A signal of some sort is communicated to the subject,
and at the same instant records itself on a time-register
ing apparatus. The subject then makes a muscular move
ment of some sort, which is the * reaction,' and which also
records itself automatically. The time found to have elapsed
between the two records is the total time of that observation.
The time-registering instruments are of various types.

Signal. Reaction.

J I

Reaction- line
Time-line.

FIG. 21.

One type is that of the revolving drum covered with smoLed
paper, on which one electric pen traces a line which the
signal breaks and the ( reaction ' draws again ; whilst another
electric pen (connected with a pendulum or a rod of metal
vibrating at a known rate) traces alongside of the former

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN- ACTIVITY. 87

line a ' time-line ' of which each undulation or link stands
for a certain fraction of a second, and against which the
break in the reaction-line can be measured. Compare
Fig. 21, where the line is broken by the signal at the first
arrow, and continued again by the reaction at the second.
Ludwig's Kymograph, Marey's Chronograph are good ex
amples of this type of instrument.

Another type of instrument is represented by the stop
watch, of which the most perfect form is Hipp's Chrono-
scope. The hand on the dial measures intervals as short
as j-fas of a second. The signal (by an appropriate electric

FIG. 2-2.— Bowditeh's Reaction-timer. F, tuning-fork carrying a little plate which
holds the paper on which the electric pen M makes the tracing, and sliding in
grooves on the base-board. P, a plug which spreads the prongs of the fork apart
when it is pushed forward to its extreme limit, and releases them when it is drawn
back to a certain point. The fork then vibrates, and, its backward movement con
tinuing, an undulating line is drawn on the smoked paper by the pen. At T is a
tongue fixed to the carriage of the fork, and at K an electric key which the tongue
opens and with which the electric pen is connected. At the instant of opening, the
t>en changes its place and the undulating line is drawn at a different level on the
paper. The opening can be made to serve as a signal to the reacter in a variety
of ways, and his reaction can be made to close the pen again, when the line re
turns to its first level. The reaction time = the number of undulations traced at
the second level.

connection) starts it ; the reaction stops it ; and by reading
off its initial and terminal positions we have immediately
and with no farther trouble the time we seek. A still
simpler instrument, though one not very satisfactory in its
working, is the ' psychodometer ' of Exner & Obersteiner,
of which I picture a modification devised by my colleague
Professor H. P. Bowditch, which works very well.

The manner in which the signal and reaction are con
nected with the chronographic apparatus varies indefinitely

88 PSYCHOLOGY.

in different experiments. Every new problem requires
some new electric or mechanical disposition of apparatus.*

The least complicated time-measurement is that known
as simple reaction-time, in which there is but one possible
signal and one possible movement, and both are known in
advance. The movement is generally the closing of an elec
tric key with the hand. The foot, the jaw, the lips, even
the eyelid, have been in turn made organs of reaction, and
the apparatus has been modified accordingly, f The time
usually elapsing between stimulus and movement lies be
tween one and three tenths of a second, varying according
to circumstances which will be mentioned anon.

The subject of experiment, whenever the reactions are
short and regular, is in a state of extreme tension, and feels,
when the signal comes, as if it started the reaction, by a
sort of fatality, and as if no psychic process of perception
or volition had a chance to intervene. The whole succession
is so rapid that perception seems to be retrospective, and
the time-order of events to be read off in memory rather
than known at the moment. This at least is my own per
sonal experience in the matter, and with it I find others to
agree. The question is, What happens inside of us, either
in brain or mind ? and to answer that we must analyze just
what processes the reaction involves. It is evident that
some time is lost in each of the following stages :

1. The stimulus excites the peripheral sense-organ
adequately for a current to pass into the sensory nerve ;

2. The sensory nerve is traversed ;

3. The transformation (or reflection) of the sensory into
a motor current occurs in the centres ;

4. The spinal cord and motor nerve are traversed ;

5. The motor current excites the muscle to the contract
ing point.

* The reader will find a great deal about chronographic apparatus in
J. Marey : La Methode Grapbique, pt. n. chap. n. One can make pretty
fair measurements with no other instrument than a watch, by making a
large number of reactions, each serving as a signal for the following one,
and dividing the total time they take by their number. Dr. O. W. Holmes
first suggested this method, which has been ingeniously elaborated and
applied by Professor Jastrow. See Science ' for September 10. 1886.

I See, for a few modifications, Cattell, Mind, xi. 220 ff.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 89

Time is also lost, of course, outside the muscle, in the
joints, skin, etc., and between the parts of the apparatus ;
and when the stimulus which serves as signal is applied to
the skin of the trunk or limbs, time is lost in the sensorial
conduction through the spinal cord.

The stage marked 3 is the only one that interests us
here. The other stages answer to purely physiological
processes, but stage 3 is psycho-physical ; that is, it is a
higher-central process, and has probably some sort of con
sciousness accompanying it. What sort?

Wundt has little difficulty in deciding that it is con
sciousness of a quite elaborate kind. He distinguishes
between two stages in the conscious reception of an im
pression, calling one perception, and the other apperception,
and likening the one to the mere entrance of an object into
the periphery of the field of vision, and the other to its
coming to occupy the focus or point of view. Inattentive
aivareness of an object, and attention to it, are, it seems to
me, equivalents for perception and apperception, as Wundt
uses the words. To these two forms of awareness of the
impression Wundt adds the conscious volition to react,
gives to the trio the name of ' psycho-physical ' processes,
and assumes that they actually follow upon each other in
the succession in which they have been named. * So at
least I understand him. The simplest way to determine
the time taken up by this psycho-physical stage No. 3
would be to determine separately the duration of the sev
eral purely physical processes, 1, 2, 4, and 5, and to sub
tract them from the total reaction-time. Such attempts
have been made, t But the data for calculation are too

* Physiol. Psych., n. 221-2. Cf. also the first edition, 728-9. I must
confess to finding all Wundt's utterances about 'apperception ' both vacil
lating and obscure. I see no use whatever for the word, as he employs it,
in Psychology. Attention, perception, conception, volition, are its ample
equivalents. Why we should need a single word to denote all these things
by turns, Wundt fails to make clear. Consult, however, his pupil Staude's
article, ' Ueber den Begriff der Apperception,' etc., in Wundt's periodical
Philosophische Studien, i. 149, which may be supposed official. For a
minute criticism of Wundt's 'apperception,' see Marty. Vierteljahrschrift
f. wiss. Philos. , x. 346.

f By Exner, for example, Pfluger's Archiv, vn. 628 ff.

90 PSYCHOLOGY.

inaccurate for use, and, as Wundt himself admits, * the pre
cise duration of stage 3 must at present be left enveloped
with that of the other processes, in the total reaction-time.
My own belief is that no such succession of conscious
feelings as Wundt describes takes place during stage 3.
It is a process of central excitement and discharge, with
which doubtless some feeling coexists, but ivhat feeling we
cannot tell, because it is so fugitive and so immediately
eclipsed by the more substantive and enduring memory of
the impression as it came in, and of the executed move
ment of response. Feeling of the impression, attention to
it, thought of the reaction, volition to react, ivould, undoubt
edly, all be links of the process under other conditions, f and
would lead to the same reaction — after an indefinitely longer
time. But these other conditions are not those of the
experiments we are discussing ; and it is mythological psy
chology (of which we shall see many later examples) to con
clude that because two mental processes lead to the same
result they must be similar in their inward subjective con
stitution. The feeling of stage 3 is certainly no articulate
perception. It can be nothing but the mere sense of a
reflex discharge. The reaction ivhose time is measured is,
in short, a reflex action pure and simple, and not a psychic
act. A foregoing psychic condition is, it is true, a pre
requisite for this reflex action. The preparation of the
attention and volition ; the expectation of the signal and
the readiness of the hand to move, the instant it shall come ;
the nervous tension in which the subject waits, are all con
ditions of the formation in him for the time being of a new
path or arc of reflex discharge. The tract from the sense-
organ which receives the stimulus, into the motor centre
which discharges the reaction, is already tingling with pre
monitory innervation, is raised to such a pitch of heightened
irritability by the expectant attention, that the signal is
instantaneously sufficient to cause the overflow.^ No other
* P. 222. Cf. also Riohet, Rev. Philos., vi. 395-6. ~
t For instance, if, on the previous day, one had resolved to act on a
signal when it should come, and it now came whilst we were engaged in
other things, and reminded us of the resolve.

£ " I need hardly mention that success in these experiments depends in
a high degree on our concentration of attention. If inattentive, one gets

GENEEAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 91

tract of the nervous system is, at the moment, in this hair-
trigger condition. The consequence is that one sometimes
responds to a ivrong signal, especially if it be an impression
of the same kind with the signal we expect.* But if by
chance we are tired, or the signal is unexpectedly weak,
and we do not react instantly, but only after an express
perception that the signal has come, and an express voli
tion, the time becomes quite disproportionately long (a
second or more, according to Exner t), and we feel that the
process is in nature altogether different.

In fact, the reaction-time experiments are a case to
which we can immediately apply what we have just learned
about the summation of stimuli. ' Expectant attention ' is
but the subjective name for what objectively is a partial
stimulation of a certain pathway, the pathway from the
4 centre ' for the signal to that for the discharge. In Chapter
XI we shall see that all attention involves excitement from
within of the tract concerned in feeling the objects to which
attention is given. The tract here is the excito-motor arc
about to be traversed. The signal is but the spark from
without which touches off a train already laid. The per
formance, under these conditions, exactly resembles any
reflex action. The only difference is that whilst, in the
ordinarily so-called reflex acts, the reflex arc is a permanent
result of organic growth, it is here a transient result of
previous cerebral conditions. ;£

very discrepant figures. . . . This concentration of the attention is in the
highest degree exhausting. After some experiments in which I was con
cerned to get results as uniform as possible, I was covered witli perspiration
and excessively fatigued although I had sat quietly in my chair all the
while." (Exner, loc. cit. vn. 618.)

* Wundt, Physiol. Psych., n. 226.

f Pfliiger's Archiv, vn. 616.

\ In short, what M. Delboeuf calls an 'organe adventice.' The reaction-
time, moreover, is quite compatible with the reaction itself being of a reflex
order. Some reflexes (sneezing, e.g.) are very slow. The only time-
measurement of a reflex act in the human subject with which I am
acquainted is Exner's measurement of winking (in Pfliiger's Archiv f.
d. gesammt. Physiol., Bd. vui. p. 526, 1874). He found that when the
stimulus was a flash of light it took the wink 0.2168 sec. to occur. A strong
electric shock to the cornea shortened the time to 0.0578 sec. The ordinary
' reaction-time ' is midway between these values. Exuer ' reduces ' his times
by eliminating the physiological process of conduction. His 'reduced

92 PSYCHOLOGY.

I am happy to say that since the preceding paragraphs
(and the notes thereto appertaining) were written, Wundt
has himself become converted to the view which I defend.
He now admits that in the shortest reactions "there is
neither apperception nor will, but that they are merely
brain-reflexes due to practice." * The means of his conver.
sion are certain experiments performed in his laboratory
by Herr L. Lange, t who was led to distinguish between
two ways of setting the attention in reacting on a signal,
and who found that they gave very different time-results.
In the ' extreme sensorial ' way, as Lange calls it, of reacting,

minimum winking-time' is then 0.0471 (ibid. 531), whilst his reduced reac
tion-time is 0.0828 (itrid. vn. 637). These figures have really no scientific
value beyond that of showing, according to Exner's own belief (vn. 531),
that reaction-time and reflex-time measure processes of essentially the same
order. His description, moreover, of the process is an excellent description
of a reflex act. ' ' Every one," says he, " who makes reaction-time experi
ments for the first time is surprised to find how little he is master of his own
movements, so soon as it becomes a question of executing them with a
maximum of speed. Not only does their energy lie, as it were, outside the
field of choice, but even the time in which the movement occurs depends
only partly upon ourselves. We jerk our arm, and we can afterwards tell
with astonishing precision whether we have jerked it quicker or slower than
another time, although we have no power to jerk it exactly at the wished-for
moment." — Wundt himself admits that when we await a strong signal with
tense preparation there is no consciousness of any duality of ' appercep
tion ' and motor response; the two are continuous (Physiol. Psych., II.
226).— Mr. Cattell's view is identical with the one I defend. "I think,"
he says, "that if the processes of perception and willing are present at all
they are very rudimentary. . . . The subject, by a voluntary effort [before
the signal comes], puts the lines of communication between the centre for"
the stimulus " and the centre for the co-ordination of motions . .. in a state
of unstable equilibrium. When, therefore, a nervous impulse reaches the"
former centre, " it causes brain-changes in two directions; an impulse moves
along to the cortex and calls forth there a perception corresponding to the
stimulus, while at the same time an impulse follows a line of small resist
ance to the centre for the co-ordination of motions, and the proper nervous
impulse, already prepared and waiting for the signal, is sent from the
centre to the muscle of the hand. When the reaction has often been
made the entire cerebral process becomes automatic, the impulse of itself
takes the well-travelled way to the motor centre, and releases the motor
impulse." (Mind, xi. 232-3.)— Finally, Prof. Lipps has, in his elaborate
way (Grundtatsachen, 179-188), made mince-meat of the view that stage 3
involves either conscious perception 01 conscious will.

* Physiol. Psych., 3d edition (1887), vol. n. p. 266.

f Philosophische Studien, vol. iv. p. 479 (1888).

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN- ACTIVITY. 93

one keeps one's mind as intent as possible upon the ex
pected signal, and ' purposely avoids ' * thinking of the move
ment to be executed ; in the t extreme muscular ' way one
1 does not think at all ' t of the signal, but stands as ready as
possible for the movement. The muscular reactions are
much shorter than the sensorial ones, the average differ
ence being in the neighborhood of a tenth of a second.
Wuudt accordingly calls them ' shortened reactions ' and,
with Lange, admits them to be mere reflexes ; whilst the
sensorial reactions he calls '• complete,' and holds to his
original conception as far as they are concerned. The
facts, however, do not seem to me to warrant even this
amount of fidelity to the original Wundtia.n position.
When we begin to react in the ' extreme sensorial ' way,
Lange says that we get times so very long that they must
be rejected from the count as non-typical. " Only after
the reactor has succeeded by repeated and conscientious
practice in bringing about an extremely precise co-ordina
tion of his voluntary impulse with his sense-impression
do we get times which can be regarded as typical sensorial
reaction-times/' J Now it seems to me that these excessive
and ' untypical ' times are probably the real ' complete times/
the only ones in which distinct processes of actual percep
tion and volition occur (see above, pp. 88-9). The typical
sensorial time which is attained by practice is probably
another sort of reflex, less perfect than the reflexes pre
pared by straining one's attention towards the movement. §
The times are much more variable in the sensorial way
than in the muscular. The several muscular reactions
differ little from each other. Only in them does the phe
nomenon occur of reacting on a false signal, or of reacting
before the signal. Times intermediate between these two
types occur according as the attention fails to turn itself
exclusively to one of the extremes. It is obvious that Herr
Lange's distinction between the two types of reaction is a
highly important one, and that the 'extreme muscular

*Loc. cit. p. 488. f Loc- cit. p. 487. \Loc. cit. p. 489.

§ Lange has an interesting hypothesis as to the brain-process concerned
in the latter, for which I can only refer to his essay-

94 PSYCHOLOGY.

method,' giving both the shortest times and the most con
stant ones, ought to be aimed at in all comparative investi
gations. Herr Lange's own muscular time averaged
(T.123 ; his sensorial time, 0".230.

These reaction-time experiments are then in no sense
measurements of the swiftness of thought. Only when we
complicate them is there a chance for anything like an
intellectual operation to occur. They may be complicated
in various ways. The reaction may be withheld until the
signal has consciously awakened a distinct idea (Wundt's
discrimination-time, association-time) and then performed.
Or there may be a variety of possible signals, each with
a different reaction assigned to it, and the reacter may
be uncertain which one he is about to receive. The
reaction would then hardly seem to occur without a pre
liminary recognition and choice. "We shall see, however,
in the appropriate chapters, that the discrimination and
choice involved in such a reaction are widely different from
the intellectual operations of which we are ordinarily con
scious under those names. Meanwhile the simple reaction-
time remains as the starting point of all these superinduced
complications. It is the fundamental physiological con
stant in ail time-measurements. As such, its own variations
have an interest, and must be briefly passed in review.*

The reaction-time varies with the individual and his age.
An individual may have it particularly long in respect of
signals of one sense (Buccola, p. 147), but not of others.
Old and uncultivated people have it long (nearly a second,
in an old pauper observed by Exner, Pfliiger's Archiv, VII.
612-4). Children have it long (half a second, Herzen in
Buccola, p. 152).

Practice shortens it to a quantity which is for each indi
vidual a minimum beyond which no farther reduction can
be made. The aforesaid old pauper's time was, after
much practice, reduced to 0.1866 sec. (loc. cit. p. 626).

* The reader who wishes to know more about the matter will find a
most faithful compilation of all that has been done, together with much
original matter, in G. Buccola's 'Legge del Tempo,' etc. See also chap
ter xvi of Wundt's Physiol. Psychology; Exner in Hermann's Hdbch.,
Bd. 2, Thl. ii. pp. 252-280; aJso Ribot's Contemp. Germ. Psych
chap. vm.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 95

Fatigue lengthens it.

Concentration of attention shortens it. Details will be
given in the chapter on Attention.

The nature of the signal makes it vary.* Wundt writes :

u I found that the reaction-time for impressions on the skin with
electric stimulus is less than for true touch-sensations, as the following
averages show:

Average. vtriSSS.

Sound 0.167 sec. 0.0221 sec.

Light 0.222 u 0.0219 "

Electric skin-sensation 0.201 " 0.0115 "

Touch-sensations 0.213 " 0.0134 "

"I here bring together the averages which have been obtained by
some other observers :

Hirsch. Hankel. Exner.

Sound 0.149 0.1505 0.1360

Light 0.200 0.2246 0.1506

Skin-sensation 0.182 0. 1546 0. 1337 " t

Thermic reactions have been lately measured by A.
Goldscheider and by Vintschgau (1887), who find them
slower than reactions from touch. That from heat espe
cially is very slow, more so than from cold, the differences
(according to Goldscheider) depending on the nerve-ter
minations in the skin.

Gustatory reactions were measured by Vintschgau. They
differed according to the substances used, running up to
half a second as a maximum when identification took place.
The mere perception of the presence of the substance on
the tongue varied from 0".159 to 0".219 (Pfliiger's Archiv,
xiv. 529).

Olfactory reactions have been studied by Vintsehgau,

*The nature of the movement also seems to make it vary. Mr. B. I.
Oilman and I reacted to the same signal by simply raising our hand, and
again by carrying our hand towards oiir back. The moment registered was
always that at which the hand broke an electric contact in starting to
move. But it started one or two hundredths of a second later when the
more extensive movement was the one to be made. Orchansky, on the
other hand, experimenting on contractions of the masseter muscle, found
(Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1889, p. 187) that the greater the amplitude
of contraction intended, the shorter grew the time of reaction. He
explains this by the fact that a more ample contraction makes a greater
appeal to the attention, and that this shortens the times.

| Physiol. Psych., u. 223.

96 PSYCHOLOGY.

Buccola, and Beaunis. They are slow, averaging about
half a second (cf. Beaunis, Recherches exp. sur 1'Activite
Cerebrale, 1884, p. 49 ff.).

It will be observed that sound is more promptly reacted
on than either sight or touch. Taste and smell are slower
than either. One individual, who reacted to touch upon
the tip of the tongue in Ox/.125, took 0^.993 to react upon
the taste of quinine applied to the same spot. In another,
upon the base of the tongue, the reaction to touch being
0//.141, that to sugar was 0".552 (Vintschgau, quoted by
Buccola, p. 103). Buccola found the reaction to odors to
vary from 0".334 to 0".681, according to the perfume used
and the individual.

The intensity of the signal makes a difference. The in-
tenser the stimulus the shorter the time. Herzen (Grund-
linien einer allgem. Psychophysiologie, p. 101) compared
the reaction from a corn on the toe with that from the skin
of the hand of the same subject. The two places were
stimulated simultaneously, and the subject tried to react
simultaneously with both hand and foot, but the foot always
went quickest. When the sound skin of the foot was
touched instead of the corn, it was the hand which always
reacted first. "Wundt tries to show that when the signal is
made barely perceptible, the time is probably the same in
all the senses, namely, about 0.332" (Physiol. Psych., 2d
ed., n. 224).

Where the signal is of touch, the place to which it is
applied makes a difference in the resultant reaction-time.
G. S. Hall and V. Kries found (Archiv f. Anat. u. Physiol.,
1879) that when the finger-tip was the place the reaction
was shorter than when the middle of the upper arm was
used, in spite of the greater length of nerve-trunk to be
traversed in the latter case. This discovery invalidates the
measurements of the rapidity of transmission of the current
in human nerves, for they are all based on the method of
comparing reaction-times from places near the root and
near the extremity of a limb. The same observers found
that signals seen by the periphery of the retina gave longer
times than the same signals seen by direct vision.

The season makes a difference, the time being some hun-

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN- ACTIVITY. 97

dredths of a second shorter on cold winter days (Vintschgau
apud Exner, Hermann's Hdbli., p. 270).

Intoxicants alter the time. Coffee and tea appear to
shorten it. Small doses of ivine and alcohol first shorten and
then lengthen it ; but the shortening stage tends to disap
pear if a large dose be given immediately. This, at least,
is the report of two German observers. Dr. J. W. Warren,
whose observations are more thorough than any previous
ones, could find no very decided effects from ordinary doses
(Journal of Physiology, vm. 311). Morphia lengthens the
time. Amyl-nitrite lengthens it, but after the inhalation it
may fall to less than the normal. Ether and chloroform
lengthen it (for authorities, etc., see Buccola, p. 189).

Certain diseased states naturally lengthen the time.

The hypnotic trance has no constant effect, sometimes
shortening and sometimes lengthening it (Hall, Mind, vm.
170 ; James, Proc. Am. Soc. for Psych. Kesearch, 246).

The time taken to inhibit a movement (e.g. to cease con
traction of jaw-muscles) seems to be about the same as to
produce one (Gad, Archiv f. (Anat. u.) Physiol., 1887, 468 ;
Orchansky, ibid., 1889, 1885).

An immense amount of work has been done on reaction-
time, of which I have cited but a small part. It is a sort
of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact
minds, and they have not failed to profit by the opportunity.

CEREBRAL BLOOD-SUPPLY.

The next point to occupy our attention is the changes of
circulation which accompany cerebral activity.

All parts of the cortex, when electrically excited, produce
alterations both of respiration and circulation. The blood-
pressure rises, as a rule, all over the body, no matter where
the cortical irritation is applied, though the motor zone is
the most sensitive region for the purpose. Elsewhere the
current must be strong enough for an epileptic attack to be
produced.* Slowing and quickening of the heart are also
observed, and are independent of the vaso-constrictive
phenomenon. Mosso, using his ingenious 'plethysmo-

* Francois- Franck, Fonctions Motrices, Le^on xxn.

98 PSYCHOLOGY.

graph' as an indicator, discovered that the blood-supply to
the arms diminished during intellectual activity, and found
furthermore that the arterial tension (as shown by the
sphygmograph) was increased in these members (see

FIG. 23.— Sphymographic pulse-tracing. A, during intellectual repose ; B, during in
tellectual activity. (Mosso.)

Fig. 23). So slight an emotion as that produced by the
entrance of Professor Ludwig into the laboratory was in
stantly followed by a shrinkage of the arms.* The brain
itself is an excessively vascular organ, a sponge full of
blood, in fact ; and another of Mosso's inventions showed
that when less blood went to the arms, more went to the
head. The subject to be observed lay on a delicately bal
anced table which could tip downward either at the head
or at the foot if the weight of either end were increased.
The moment emotional or intellectual activity began in the
subject, down went the balance at the head-end, in conse
quence of the redistribution of blood in his system. But
the best proof of the immediate afflux of blood to the brain
during mental activity is due to Mosso's observations on
three persons whose brain had been laid bare by lesion of
the skull. By means of apparatus described in his book, f
this physiologist was enabled to let the brain-pulse record
itself diroctly by a tracing. The intra-cranial blood-pressure
rose immediately whenever the subject was spoken to, or
when he began to think actively, as in solving a problem in
mental arithmetic. Mosso gives in his work a large num
ber of reproductions of tracings which show the instanta-
neity of the change of blood-supply, whenever the mental
activity was quickened by any cause whatever, intellectual

* La Paura(1884), p. 117.

t Ueber den Kreislauf des Blutes im menschlicheii Gehirn (1881).
chap. ii. The Introduction gives the history of our previous knowledge
:>f the subject.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY.

or emotional. He relates of his female subject that one
day whilst tracing her brain-pulse he observed a sudden
rise with no apparent outer or inner cause. She however
confessed to him afterwards that at that moment she had
caught sight of a skull on top of a piece of furniture in the
voom3 and that this had given her a slight emotion.

The fluctuations of the blood supply to the brain were
independent of respiratory changes,* and followed the
quickening of mental activity almost immediately. We
must suppose a very delicate adjustment whereby the cir
culation follows the needs of the cerebral activity. Blood
very likely may rush to each region of the cortex accord
ing as it is most active, but of this we know nothing. I need
hardly say that the activity of the nervous matter is the
primary phenomenon, and the afflux of blood its secondary
consequence. Many popular writers talk as if it were
the other way about, and as if mental activity were due to
the afflux of blood. But, as Professor H. N. Martin has
well said, "that belief has no physiological foundation
whatever; it is even directly opposed to all that we know of
cell life."f A chronic pathological congestion may, it is true,
have secondary consequences, but the primary congestions
which we have been considering follow the activity of the
brain-cells by an adaptive reflex vaso-motor mechanism
doubtless as elaborate as that which harmonizes blood-
supply with cell-action in any muscle or gland.

Of the changes in the cerebral circulation during sleep
I will speak in the chapter which treats of that subject.

CEREBRAL THERMOMETRY.

Brain-activity seems accompanied by a local disengagement
of heat. The earliest careful work in this direction was by
Dr. J. S. Lombard in 1867. Dr. Lombard's latest results in
clude the records of over 60,000 observations.^: He noted the

* In this conclusion M. Gley (Archives de Pbysiologie, 1881, p. 742)
agrees with Professor Mosso. Gley found his pulse rise 1-3 beats, his
carotid dilate, and his radial artery contract during hard mental work.
f Address before Med. and Chirurg. Society of Maryland, 1879
^ See his book. "Experimental Researches on the Regional Tempera
lure of the Head" (London. 1879).

100 PSYCHOLOGY.

changes in delicate thermometers and electric piles placed
against the scalp in human beings, and found that any intel
lectual effort, such as computing, composing, reciting poetry
silently or aloud, and especially that emotional excitement
such as an anger fit, caused a general rise of temperature,
which rarely exceeded a degree Fahrenheit. The rise was
in most cases more marked in the middle region of the head
than elsewhere. Strange to say, it was greater in reciting
poetry silently than in reciting it aloud. Dr. Lombard's
explanation is that " in internal recitation an additional
portion of energy, which in recitation aloud was con
verted into nervous and muscular force, now appears as
heat." * I should suggest rather, if we must have a theory,
that the surplus of heat in recitation to one's self is due to
inhibitory processes which are absent when we recite aloud.
In the chapter on the Will we shall see that the simple cen
tral process is to speak when we think ; to think silently
involves a check in addition. In 1870 the indefatigable
Schiff took up the subject, experimenting on live dogs and
chickens, plunging thermo-electric needles into the sub
stance of their brain, to eliminate possible errors from
vascular changes in the skin when the thermometers were
placed upon the scalp. After habituation was established,
he tested the animals with various sensations, tactile, optic,
olfactory, and auditory. He found very regularly an im
mediate deflection of the galvanometer, indicating an abrupt
alteration of the intra-cerebral temperature. When, for in
stance, he presented an empty roll of paper to the nose of
his dog as it lay motionless, there was a small deflection,
but when a piece of meat was in the paper the deflection
was much greater. Schiff concluded from these and other
experiments that sensorial activity heats the brain-tissue,
but he did not try to localize the increment of heat beyond
finding that it was in both hemispheres, whatever might be
the sensation applied, t Dr. E. W. Amidon in 1880 made
a farther step forward, in localizing the heat produced by
voluntary muscular contractions. Applying a number of

* Loc. cit. p. 195.

f The most convenient account of Schiff's experiments is by Prof,
fierzen, in the Revue Philosophique, vol. in. p. 36.

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN- ACTIVITY. 101

delicate surface-thermometers simultaneously against the
scalp, he found that when different muscles of the body
were made to contract vigorously for ten minutes or more,
different regions of the scalp rose in temperature, that the
regions were well focalized, and that the rise of temperature
was often considerably over a Fahrenheit degree. As a re
sult of his investigations he gives a diagram in which num
bered regions represent the centres of highest temperature
for the various special movements which were investigated.
To a large extent they correspond to the centres for the
same movements assigned by Ferrier and others on other
grounds ; only they cover more of the skull.*

Phosphorus and Thought.

Chemical action must of course accompany brain-activity.
But little definite is known of its exact nature. Cholesterin
and creatin are both excrementitious products, and are
both found in the brain. The subject belongs to chemistry
rather than to psychology, and I only mention it here for
the sake of saying a word about a wide-spread popu
lar error about brain-activity and phosphorus. ' Ohm
Phosphor, kein Gedanke,' was a noted war-cry of the
' materialists ' during the excitement on that subject which
filled Germany in the '60s. The brain, like every other
organ of the body, contains phosphorus, and a score of
other chemicals besides. Why the phosphorus should be
picked out as its essence, no one knows. It would be
equally true to say ' Ohne Wasser kein Gedanke,' or ' Ohne
Kochsalz kein Gedanke ' ; for thought would stop as quickly
if the brain should dry up or lose its NaCl as if it lost its
phosphorus. In America the phosphorus-delusion has
twined itself round a saying quoted (rightly or wrongly)
from Professor L. Agassiz, to the effect that fishermen are
more intelligent than farmers because they eat so much fish,
which contains so much phosphorus. All the facts may be
doubted.

The only straight way to ascertain the importance of

* A New Study of Cerebral Cortical Localization (N. Y., Putnam,
1880), pp. 48-53.

1TJ2 PSYCHOLOGY.

phosphorus to thought would be to find whether more is
excreted by the brain during mental activity than during
rest. Unfortunately we cannot do this directly, but can
only gauge the amount of PO6 in the urine, which repre
sents other organs as well as the brain, and this procedure,
as Dr. Edes says, is like measuring the rise of water at the
mouth of the Mississippi to tell where there has been a
thunder-storm in Minnesota.* It has been adopted, how
ever, by a variety of observers, some of whom found the
phosphates in the urine diminished, whilst others found
them increased, by intellectual work. On the whole, it is
impossible to trace any constant relation. In maniacal
excitement less phosphorus than usual seems to be excreted.
More is excreted during sleep. There are differences be
tween the alkaline and earthy phosphates into which I will
not enter, as my only aim is to show that the popular way
of looking at the matter has no exact foundation, f The
fact that phosphorus-preparations may do good in nervous
exhaustion proves nothing as to the part played by phos
phorus in mental activity. Like iron, arsenic, and other
remedies it is a stimulant or tonic, of whose intimate work
ings in the system we know absolutely nothing, and which
moreover does good in an extremely small number of the
cases in which it is prescribed.

The phosphorus-philosophers have often compared
thought to a secretion. " The brain secretes thought, as the
kidneys secrete urine, or as the liver secretes bile," are
phrases which one sometimes hears. The lame analogy
need hardly be pointed out. The materials which the brain
pours into the blood (cholesterin, creatin, xanthin, or what
ever they may be) are the analogues of the urine and the
bile, being in fact real material excreta. As far as these
matters go, the brain is a ductless gland. But we know of
nothing connected with liver- and kidney-activity which can

* Archives of Medicine, vol. x, No. 1 (1883).

f Without multiplying references, I will simply cite Mendel (Archiv f .
Psychiatric, vol. in, 1871), Mairet (Archives de Neurologic, vol. ix, 1885),
and Beaunis (Rech. Experimentales sur 1'Activite Cerebrale, 1887). Richet
gives a partial bibliography in the Revue Scientifique, vol. 38, p. 788 (1886).

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-ACTIVITY. 103

be in the remotest degree compared with the stream of
thought that accompanies the brain's material secretions.

There remains another feature of general brain-physi
ology, and indeed for psychological purposes the most
important feature of all. I refer to the aptitude of the brain
for acquiring habits. But I will treat of that in a chapter
by itself.

OHAPTEK IV.*
HABIT.

WHEN we look at living creatures from an outward point
of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they
are bundles of habits. In wild animals, the usual round of
daily behavior seems a necessity implanted at birth; in
animals domesticated, and especially in man, it seems, to a
great extent, to be the result of education. The habits to
which there is an innate tendency are called instincts ; some
of those due to education would by most persons be called
acts of reason. It thus appears that habit covers a very
large part of life, and that one engaged in studying the
objective manifestations of mind is bound at the very out
set to define clearly just what its limits are.

The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led
to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of
Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the
different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions
and reactions upon each other. In the organic world, how
ever, the habits are more variable than this. Even instincts
vary from one individual to another of a kind; and are
modified in the same individual, as we shall later see, to
suit the exigencies of the case. The habits of an elemen
tary particle of matter cannot change (on the principles of
the atomistic philosophy), because the particle is itself an
unchangeable thing ; but those of a compound mass of
matter can change, because they are in the last instance due
to the structure of the compound, and either outward forces
or inward tensions can, from one hour to another, turn that
structure into something different from what it was. That
is, they can do so if the body be plastic enough to maintain

* This chapter has already appeared in the Popular Science Monthly
for February 1887.

104

HABIT. 105

its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields.
The change of structure here spoken of need not involve
the outward shape ; it may be invisible and molecular, as
when a bar of iron becomes magnetic or crystalline through
the action of certain outward causes, or India-rubber
becomes friable, or plaster ' sets.' All these changes are
rather slow ; the material in question opposes a certain
resistance to the modifying cause, which it takes time to
overcome, but the gradual yielding whereof often saves the
material from being disintegrated altogether. When the
structure has yielded, the same inertia becomes a condition
of its comparative permanence in the new form, and of the
new habits the body then manifests. Plasticity, then, in
the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a struc
ture weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong
enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable
phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by
what we may call a new set of habits. Organic matter,
especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very ex
traordinary degree of plasticity of this sort; so that we
may without hesitation lay down as our first proposition
the following, that the phenomena of habit in living beings are
due to the plasticity* of the organic materials of wliich their
bodies are composed.

But the philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance,
a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychol
ogy. That it is at bottom a physical principle is admitted
by all good recent writers on the subject. They call atten
tion to analogues of acquired habits exhibited by dead mat
ter. Thus, M. Leon Dumont, whose essay on habit is per
haps the most philosophical account yet published, writes :

" Every one knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain
time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new;
there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of
cohesion. A lock works better after being used some time; at the out
set more force was required to overcome certain roughnesses in the
mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of
habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been

* In the sense above explained, which applies to inner structure as well
as to outer form.

106 PSYCHOLOGY.

folded already. This saving of trouble is due to the essential nature ot
habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount
of the outward cause is required. The sounds of a violin improve by
use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibres of the wood at last
contract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. This is
what gives such inestimable value to instruments that have belonged to
great masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which
grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes,
when it flows again, the path traced by itself before. Just so, the im
pressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous system
more and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recur
under similar excitements from without, when they have been inter
rupted a certain time." *

Not in the nervous system alone. A scar anywhere is
a locus minoris resistentice, more liable to be abraded,
inflamed, to suffer pain and cold, than are the neighboring
parts. A sprained ankle, a dislocated arm, are in danger
of being sprained or dislocated again ; joints that have once
been attacked by rheumatism or gout, mucous membranes
that have been the seat of catarrh, are with each fresh re
currence more prone to a relapse, until often the morbid
state chronically substitutes itself for the sound one. And
if we ascend to the nervous system, we find how many so-
called functional diseases seem to keep themselves going
simply because they happen to have once begun; and how
the forcible cutting short by medicine of a few attacks is
often sufficient to enable the physiological forces to get pos
session of the field again, and to bring the organs back to
functions of health. Epilepsies, neuralgias, convulsive affec
tions of various sorts, insomnias, are so many cases in point.
And, to take what are more obviously habits, the success
with which a 'weaning' treatment can often be applied to
the victims of unhealthy indulgence of passion, or of
mere complaining or irascible disposition, shows us how
much the morbid manifestations themselves were due to the
mere inertia of the nervous organs, when once launched on
a false career.

Can we now form a notion of what the inward physical
changes may be like, in organs whose habits have thus

* Revne Philosophique, i, 324.

HABIT. 107

struck into new paths ? In other words, can we say just
what mechanical facts the expression ' change of habit1
covers when it is applied to a nervous system ? Certainly
we cannot in anything like a minute or definite way. But
our usual scientific custom of interpreting hidden molecular
events after the analogy of visible massive ones enables us to
frame easily an abstract and general scheme of processes
which the physical changes in question may be like. And
when once the possibility of some kind of mechanical inter
pretation is established, Mechanical Science, in her present
mood, will not hesitate to set her brand of ownership upon
the matter, feeling sure that it is only a question of time
when the exact mechanical explanation of the case shall be
found out.

If habits are due to the plasticity of materials to out
ward agents, we can immediately see to what outward
influences, if to any, the brain-matter is plastic. Not to
mechanical pressures, not to thermal changes, not to any
of the forces to which all the other organs of our body are
exposed ; for nature has carefully shut up our brain and
spinal cord in bony boxes, where no influences of this sort
can get at them. She has floated them in fluid so that
only the severest shocks can give them a concussion, and
blanketed and wrapped them about in an altogether excep
tional way. The only impressions that can be made upon
them are through the blood, on the one hand, and through
the sensory nerve-roots, on the other ; and it is to the infi
nitely attenuated currents that pour in through these latter
channels that the hemispherical cortex shows itself to be so
peculiarly susceptible. The currents, once in, must find a
way out. In getting out they leave their traces in the paths
which they take. The only thing they can do, in short, is
to deepen old paths or to make new ones ; and the whole
plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when
we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the
sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do
not easily disappear. For, of course, a simple habit, like
every other nervous event — the habit of snuffling, for
example, or of putting one's hands into one's pockets, or of
biting one's nails — is, mechanically, nothing but a reflex

108 PSYCHOLOGY.

discharge ; and its anatomical substratum must be a path
in the system. The most complex habits, as we shall
presently see more fully, are, from the same point of view,
1 nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres,
lue to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, so
>rganized as to wake each other up successively — the im
pression produced by one muscular contraction serving as
a stimulus to provoke the next, until a final impression
inhibits the process and closes the chain. The only diffi
cult mechanical problem is to explain the formation de novo
of a simple reflex or path in a pre-existing nervous system.
Here, as in so many other cases, it is only the premier pas
qui coute. For the entire nervous system is nothing but a
system of paths between a sensory terminus a quo and a mus
cular, glandular, or other terminus ad quern. A path once
traversed by a nerve-current might be expected to follow
the law of most of the paths we know, and to be scooped
out and made more permeable than before ; * and this ought
to be repeated with each new passage of the current.
Whatever obstructions may have kept it at first from being
a path should then, little by little, and more and more, be
swept out of the way, until at last it might become a natural
drainage-channel. This is what happens where either
solids or liquids pass over a path ; there seems no reason
why it should not happen where the thing that passes is a
mere wave of rearrangement in matter that does not dis
place itself, but merely changes chemically or turns itself
round in place, or vibrates across the line. The most
plausible views of the nerve-current make it out to be the
passage of some such wave of rearrangement as this. If
only a part of the matter of the path were to ' rearrange '
itself, the neighboring parts remaining inert, it is easy to
see how their inertness might oppose a friction which it
would take many waves of rearrangement to break down
and overcome. If we call the path itself the ' organ,' and
the wave of rearrangement the ' function,' then it is obvi-

* Some paths, to be sure, are banked up by bodies moving through
them under too great pressure, and made impervious. These special cases
we disregard.

HABIT. 109

ously a case for repeating the celebrated French formula
of ' La f (motion fait V organs.'

So nothing is easier than to imagine how, when a cur
rent once has traversed a path, it should traverse it more
readily still a second time. But what made it ever traverse
it the first time ? * In answering this question we can only
fall back on our general conception of a nervous system as
a mass of matter whose parts, constantly kept in states of
different tension, are as constantly tending to equalize their
states. The equalization between any two points occurs
through whatever path may at the moment be most per-j
vious. But, as a given point of the system may belong,'
actually or potentially, to many different paths, and, as the

i play of nutrition is subject to accidental changes, blockf
may from time to time occur, and make currents shoot
through unwonted lines. Such an unwonted line would be
a new-created path, which if traversed repeatedly, would
become the beginning of a new reflex arc. All this is vague
to the last degree, and amounts to little more than saying
that a new path may be formed by the sort of chances that

} in nervous material are likely to occur. But, vague as it
is, it is really the last word of our wisdom in the matter, f
It must be noticed that the growth of structural modi
fication in living matter may be more rapid than in any
lifeless mass, because the incessant nutritive renovation of
which the living matter is the seat tends often to corroborate

* We cannot say the will, for, though many, perhaps most, human
habits were once voluntary actions, no action, as we shall see in a later
chapter, can be primarily such. While an habitual action may once have
been voluntary, the voluntary action must before that, at least ouce, have
been impulsive or reflex. It is this very first occurrence of all that we
consider in the text.

f Those who desire a more definite formulation may consult J. Fiske's
'Cosmic Philosophy,' vol. n. pp. 142-146 and Spencer's 'Principles of
Biology,' sections 302 and 803, and the part entitled ' Physical Synthesis'
of his ' Principles of Psychology.' Mr. Spencer there tries, not only to
show how new actions may arise in nervous systems and form new reflex
arcs therein, but even how nervous tissue may actually be born by the pas
sage of new waves of isometric transformation through an originally indif
ferent mass. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Spencer's data, under a great
show of precision, conceal vagueness and improbability, and even self
contradiction.

110 PSYCHOLOGY.

fix the impressed modification, rather than to counter-
jact it by renewing the original constitution of the tissue
/ that has been impressed. Thus, we notice after exercising
our muscles or our brain in a new way, that we can do so
no longer at that time ; but after a day or two of rest, when
! we resume the discipline, our increase in skill not seldom
surprises us. I have often noticed this in learning a tune ;
and it has led a German author to say that we learn to swim
during the winter and to skate during the summer.
Dr. Carpenter writes :*

" It is a matter of universal experience that every kind of training
for special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more per
manent impress, when exerted on the growing organism than when
brought to bear on the adult. The effect of such training is shown in
the tendency of the organ to ' grow to ' the mode in which it is habitually
exercised ; as is evidenced by the increased size and power of particular
sets of muscles, and the extraordinary flexibility of joints, which are
acquired by such as have been early exercised in gymnastic perfor-
mances. . . . There is no part of the organism of man in which the
reconstructive activity is so great, during the whole period of life, as it
; is in the ganglionic substance of the brain. This is indicated by the
enormous supply of blood which it receives. ... It is, moreover, a
fact of great significance that the nerve-substance is specially dis
tinguished by its reparative power. For while injuries of other tissues
(such as the muscular) which are distinguished by the speciality of their
structure and endowments, are repaired by substance of a lower or less
specialized type, those of nerve-substance are repaired by a complete
reproduction of the normal tissue ; as is evidenced in the sensibility of
the newly forming skin which is closing over an open wound, or in the
recovery of the sensibility of a piece of ' transplanted ' skin, which has
for a time been rendered insensible by the complete interruption of the
continuity of its nerves. The most remarkable example of this repro
duction, however, is afforded by the results of M. Brown-Sequard'st
\experiments upon the gradual restoration of the functional activity of
}the spinal cord after its complete division ; which takes place in a way
that indicates rather a reproduction of the whole, or the lower part of
the cord and of the nerves proceeding from it, than a mere reunion of
divided surfaces. This reproduction is but a special manifestation of
the reconstructive change which is always taking place in the nervous
system ; it being not less obvious to the eye of reason that the ' waste '
occasioned by its functional activity must be constantly repaired by the

f • Mental Physiology ' (1874.) pp. 339-345.

t [See, later, Masius in Van Benedens' and Van Bambeke's 'Archives
de Biologie,' vol. I (Liege, 1880).— W. J.]

HABIT. Ill

production of new tissue, than it is to the eye of sense that such repa
ration supplies an actual loss of substance by disease or injury.

"Now, in this constant and active reconstruction of the nervous
system, we recognize a most marked conformity to the general plan '
manifested in the nutrition of the organism as a whole. For, in the I

/ first place, it is obvious that there is a tendency to the production of a
/ ! determinate type of structure ; which type is often not merely that of

<. the species, but some special modification of it which characterized one
or both of the progenitors. But this type is peculiarly liable to modi
fication during the early period of life ; in which the functional activity
of the nervous system (and particularly of the brain) is extraordinarily
great, and the reconstructive process proportionally active. And this
modifiability expresses itself in the formation of the mechanism by
which those secondarily automatic modes of movement come to be
established, which, in man, take the place of those that are congenital
in most of the animals beneath him ; and those modes of sense-percep
tion come to be acquired, which are elsewhere clearly instinctive. For
there can be no reasonable doubt that, in both cases, a nervous
mechanism is developed in the course of this self-education, correspond
ing with that which the lower animals inherit from their parents. The
plan of that rebuilding process, which is necessary to maintain the
integrity of the organism generally, and which goes on with peculiar
activity in this portion of it. is thus being incessantly modified ; and in
this manner all that portion of it which ministers to the external life of
sense and motion that is shared by man with the animal kingdom at
large, becomes at adult age the expression of the habits which the
individual has acquired during the period of growth and development.
Of these habits, some are common to the race generally, while others .
are peculiar to the individual ; those of the former kind (such as walk
ing erect) being universally acquired, save where physical inability
prevents ; while for the latter a special training is needed, which is
usually the more effective the earlier it is begun — as is remarkably
seen in the case of such feats of dexterity as require a conjoint edu
cation of the perceptive and of the motor powers. And when thus
developed during the period of growth, so as to have become a part of
the constitution of the adult, the acquired mechanism is thenceforth K
maintained in the ordinary course of the nutritive operations, so as to j /<
be ready for use when called upon, even after long inaction.

"What is so clearly true of the nervous apparatus of animal life can
scarcely be otherwise than true of that which ministers to the automatic ,
activity of the mind. For, as already shown, the study of psychology
has evolved no more certain result than that there are uniformities of
mental action which aro so entirely conformable to those of bodily action
as to indicate their intimate relation to a ' mechanism of thought and

' feeling,' acting under the like conditions with that of sense and motion.
The psychical principles of association, indeed, and the physiological
principles of nutrition, simply express — the former in terms of mind,

PSYCHOLOGY.

the latter in terms of brain — the universally admitted fact that any
sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to
perpetuate itself ; so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to
think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel,
or do, under like circumstances, without any consciously formed pur
pose, or anticipation of results. For there is no reason to regard the
cerebrum as an exception to the general principle that, while each part
of the organism tends to form itself in accordance with the mode in
which it is habitually exercised, this tendency will be especially strong
in the nervous apparatus, in virtue of that incessant regeneration which
is the very condition of its functional activity. It scarcely, indeed,
admits of doubt that every state of ideational consciousness which is
either very strong or is habitually repeated leaves an organic impres
sion on the cerebrum ; in virtue of which that same state may be re
produced at any future time, in respondence to a suggestion fitted to
excite it. ... The 'strength of early association' is a fact so
universally recognized that the expression of it has become proverbial ;
and this precisely accords with the physiological principle that, during
the period of growth and development, the formative activity of the
brain will be most amenable to directing influences. It is in this way
that what is early ' learned by heart ' becomes branded in (as it were)
upon the cerebrum ; so that its ' traces ' are never lost, even though
the conscious memory of it may have completely faded out. For, when
the organic modification has been once fixed in the growing brain, it
becomes a part of the normal fabric, and is regularly maintained by
nutritive substitution ; so that it may endure to the end of life, like the
scar of a wound."

Dr. Carpenter's phrase that our nervous system groivs to
the modes in which it has been exercised expresses the philos
ophy of habit in a nutshell. We may now trace some of
the practical applications of the principle to human life.

The first result of it is that habit simplifies the movements
required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate
and diminishes fatigue.

1 ' The beginner at the piano not only moves his finger up and down
in order to depress the key, he moves the whole hand, the forearm and
even the entire body, especially moving its least rigid part, the head,
as if he would press down the key with that organ too. Often a con
traction of the abdominal muscles occurs as well. Principally, however,
the impulse is determined to the motion of the hand and of the single
finger. This is, in the first place, because the movement of the finger
is the movement thought of, and, in the second place, because its move
ment and that of the key are the movements we try to perceive, along
with the results of the latter on the ear. The more often the process

HABIT. 113

is repeated, the more easily the movement follows, on account of the
increase in permeability of the nerves engaged.

"But the more easily the movement occurs, the slighter is the
stimulus required to set it up ; and the slighter the stimulus is, the
more its effect is confined to the fingers alone.

" Thus, an impulse which originally spread its effects over the whole
body, or at least over many of its movable parts, is gradually deter
mined to a single definite organ, in which it effects the contraction of
a few limited muscles. In this change the thoughts and perceptions
which start the impulse acquire more and more intimate causal relations
with a particular group of motor nerves.

" To recur to a simile, at least partially apt, imagine the nervous
system to represent a drainage-system, inclining, on the whole, toward
certain muscles, but with the escape thither somewhat clogged. Then
streams of water will, on the whole, tend most to fill the drains that
go towards these muscles and to wash out the escape. In case of a
sudden ' flushing,' however, the whole system of channels will fill itself,
and the water overflow everywhere before it escapes. But a moderate
quantity of water invading the system will flow through the proper
escape alone.

" Just so with the piano-player. As soon as his impulse, which has
gradually learned to confine itself to single muscles, grows extreme,
it overflows into larger muscular regions. He usually plays with his
fingers, his body being at rest. But no sooner does he get excited than
his whole body becomes 'animated,' and he moves his head and trunk,
in particular, as if these also were organs with which he meant to
belabor the keys."*

Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he
has ready-made arrangements for in his nerve-centres.
Most of the performances of other animals are automatic.
But in him the number of them is so ^normous, that most
of them must be the fruit of painful study. If practice did
not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of ner
vous and muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorry
plight. As Dr. Maudsley says : f

"If an act became no easier after being done several times, if the
careful direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishment
on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime might
be confined to one or two deeds — that no progress could take place in
development. A man might be occupied all day in dressing and un-

* G. H. Schneider : ' Der menschliche Wille ' (1882), pp. 417-419 (freely
translated). For the drain-simile, see also Spencer's 'Psychology,' part
v, chap. vm.

f Physiology of Mind, p. 155.

114 PSYCHOLOGY.

dressing himself ; the attitude of his body would absorb all his atten-
tion and energy ; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a button
would be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on its first
trial ; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by his ex
ertions. Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the
many efforts which it must make, and of the ease with which it at
last stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondarily auto
matic acts are accomplished with comparatively little weariness — in
this regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflex
movements — the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaus
tion. A spinal cord without . . „ memory would simply be an idiotic
spinal cord. ... It is impossible for an individual to realize how
much he owes to its automatic agency until disease has impaired its
functions."

The next result is that habit diminishes the conscious atten
tion loith which our acts are performed.

One may state this abstractly thus : If an act require for
its execution a chain, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., of successive
nervous events, then in the first performances of the action
the conscious will must choose each of these events from a
number of wrong alternatives that tend to present them
selves ; but habit soon brings it about that each event calls
up its own appropriate successor without any alternative
offering itself, and without any reference to the conscious
will, until at last the whole chain, A, B, C, J}, E, F, G, rattles
itself off as soon as A occurs, just as if A and the rest of
the chain were fused into a continuous stream. When we
are learning to walk, to ride, to swim, skate, fence, write,
play, or sing, we interrupt ourselves at every step by un
necessary movements and false notes. When we are pro
ficients, on the contrary, the results not only follow with
the very minimum of muscular action requisite to bring them
forth, they also follow from a single instantaneous < cue.'
The marksman sees the bird, and, before he knows it, he
has aimed and shot. A gleam in his adversary's eye, a
momentary pressure from his rapier, and the fencer finds
that he has instantly made the right parry and return. A
glance at the musical hieroglyphics, and the pianist's fingers
have rippled through a cataract of notes. And not only
is it the right thing at the right time that we thus involun
tarily do, but the wrong thing also, if it be an habitual

HABIT. 115

thing. Who is there that has never wound up his watch on
taking oft* his waistcoat in the daytime, or taken his latch
key out on arriving at the door-step of a friend ? Very
absent-minded persons in going to their bedroom to dress
for dinner have been known to take off one garment after
another and finally to get into bed, merely because that was
the habitual issue of the first few movements when per
formed at a later hour. The writer well remembers how,
on revisiting Paris after ten years' absence, and, finding
himself in the street in which for one winter he had attended
school, he lost himself in a brown study, from which he was
awakened by finding himself upon the stairs which led to
the apartment in a house many streets away in which he
had lived during that earlier time, and to which his steps
from the school had then habitually led. We all of us have
a definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices
connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of
familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centres know
the order of these movements, and show their knowledge
by their ' surprise ' if the objects are altered so as to oblige
the movement to be made in a different way. But our
higher thought-centres know hardly anything about the
matter. Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, or
trousers-leg they put on first. They must first mentally
rehearse the act ; and even that is often insufficient —
the act must be performed. So of the questions, Which
valve of my double door opens first ? Which way does my
door swing ? etc. I cannot tell the answer ; yet my hand
never makes a mistake. iSo one can describe the order in
which he brushes his hair or teeth ; yet it is likely that the
order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.

These results may be expressed as follows :
In action grown habitual, what instigates each new
muscular contraction to take place in its appointed order
is not a thought or a perception, but the sensation occa
sioned by the muscular contraction just finished. A strictly
voluntary act has to be guided by idea, perception, and
volition, throughout its whole course. In an habitual ac
tion, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper

116 PSYCHOLOGY.

regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free, i
diagram will make the matter clear :

G*

FIG. 24.

Let A, B, C, D, E, F, G represent an habitual chain of
muscular contractions, and let a, b, c, d, e, f stand for the
respective sensations which these contractions excite in us
when they are successively performed. Such sensations
will usually be of the muscles, skin, or joints of the parts
moved, but they may also be effects of the movement upon
the eye or the ear. Through them, and through them
alone, we are made aware whether the contraction has or
has not occurred. When the series, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, is
being learned, each of these sensations becomes the object
of a separate perception by the mind. By it we test each
movement, to see if it be right before advancing to the next.
We hesitate, compare, choose, revoke, reject, etc., by intel'
lectual means ; and the order by which the next movement
is discharged is an express order from the ideational centres
after this deliberation has been gone through.

In habitual action, on the contrary, the only impulse
which the centres of idea or perception need send down is
the initial impulse, the command to start. This is repre
sented in the diagram by V\ it may be a thought of the
first movement or of the last result, or a mere perception
of some of the habitual conditions of the chain, the presence,
e.g., of the keyboard near the hand. In the present case,
no sooner has the conscious thought or volition instigated
movement A, than A, through the sensation a of its own
occurrence, awakens B reflexly ; B then excites C through
by and so on till the chain is ended, when the intellect gen
erally takes cognizance of the final result. The process, in
fact, resembles the passage of a wave of ' peristaltic ' motion

HABIT. 117

down the bowels. The intellectual perception at the end
is indicated in the diagram by the effect of G being repre
sented, at G', in the ideational centres above the merely
sensational line. The sensational impressions, a, 6, c, d, e,f,
are all supposed to have their seat below the ideational
lines. That our ideational centres, if involved at all by a,
I, c, d, e,f, are involved in a minimal degree, is shown by
the fact that the attention may be wholly absorbed else
where. "We may say our prayers, or repeat the alphabet,
with our attention far away.

" A musical performer will play a piece which has become familiar
by repetition while carrying on an animated conversation, or while con
tinuously engrossed by some train of deeply interesting thought; the
accustomed sequence of movements being directly prompted by the
sight of the notes, or by the remembered succession of the sounds (if
the piece is played from memory), aided in both cases by the guiding
sensations derived from the muscles themselves. But, further, a higher
degree of the same ' training ' (acting on an organism specially fitted to
profit by it) enables an accomplished pianist to play a difficult piece of
music at sight; the movements of the hands and fingers following so
immediately upon the sight of the notes that it seems impossible to
believe that any but the very shortest and most direct track can be the
channel of the nervous communication through which they are called
forth. The following curious example of the same class of acquired
aptitudes, which differ from instincts only in being prompted to action
by the will, is furnished by Robert Houdin :

" ' With a view of cultivating the rapidity of visual and tactile per
ception, and the precision of respondent movements, which are neces
sary for success in every kind of prestidigitation, Houdin early practised
the art of juggling with balls in the air; and having, after a month's
practice, become thorough master of the art of keeping up four balls at
once, he placed a book before him, and, while the balls were in the air,
accustomed himself to read without hesitation. ' This,' he says, ' will
probably seem to my readers very extraordinary; but I shall surprise
them still more when I say that I have just amused myself with repeat
ing this curious experiment. Though thirty years have elapsed since
the time I was writing, and though I have scarcely once touched the
balls during that period, I can still manage to read with ease while
keeping three balls up.' " (Autobiography, p. 26.)*

We have called a, 1), c, d, e, /, the antecedents of the suc
cessive muscular attractions, by the name of sensations.
Some authors seem to deny that they are even this. If not

* Carpenter's ' Mental Physiology ' (1874), pp. 217, 218.

118 PSYCHOLOGY.

even this, they can only be centripetal nerve-currents, not
sufficient to arouse feeling, but sufficient to arouse motor
response.* It may be at once admitted that they are not
distinct volitions. The will, if any will be present, limits
itself to a permission that they exert their motor effects.
Dr. Carpenter writes :

"There may still be metaphysicians who maintain that actions
which were originally prompted by the will with a distinct intention,
and which are still entirely under its control, can never cease to be
volitional; and that either an infinitesimally small amount of will is
required to sustain them when they have been once set going, or that
the will is in a sort of pendulum-like oscillation between the two actions
— the maintenance of the train of thought, and the maintenance of the
train of movement. But if only an infinitesimally small amount of will
is necessary to sustain them, is not this tantamount to saying that they
go on by a force of their own ? And does not the experience of the
perfect continuity of our train of thought during the performance of
movements that have become habitual, entirely negative the hypothesis
of oscillation ? Besides, if such an oscillation existed, there must be
intervals in which each action goes on of itself; so that its essentially
automatic character is virtually admitted. The physiological explana
tion, that the mechanism of locomotion, as of other habitual move
ments, grows to the mode in which it is early exercised, and that it then
works automatically under the general control and direction of the will,
can scarcely be put down by any assumption of an hypothetical neces
sity, which rests only on the basis of ignorance of one side of our com
posite nature."!

But if not distinct acts of will, these immediate ante
cedents of each movement of the chain are at any rate
accompanied by consciousness of some kind. They are
sensations to which we are usually inattentive, but which im
mediately call our attention if they go ivrong. Schneider's
account of these sensations deserves to be quoted. In the
act of walking, he says, even when our attention is entirely
off,

"we are continuously aware of certain muscular feelings; and we
have, moreover, a feeling of certain impulses to keep our equilibrium
and to set down one leg after another. It is doubtful whether we could
preserve equilibrium if no sensation of our body's attitude were there,

* Von Hartraann devotes a chapter of his ' Philosophy of the Uncon
scious ' (English translation, vol. i. p. 72) to proving that they must be
both ideas and unconscious.

f ' Mental Physiology,' p. 20.

HABIT. 119

and doubtful whether we should advance our leg if we had no sensation
of its movement as executed, and not even a minimal feeling of impulse
to set it down. Knitting appears altogether mechanical, and the knitter
keeps up her knitting even while she reads or is engaged in lively talk.
But if we ask her how this be possible, she will hardly reply that the
knitting goes on of itself. She will rather say that she has a feeling of
it, that she feels in her hands that she knits and how she must knit, and
that therefore the movements of knitting are called forth and regulated
by the sensations associated therewithal, even when the attention is
called away.

"So of everyone who practises, apparently automatically, along-
familiar handicraft. The smith turning his tongs as he smites the iron,
the carpenter wielding his plane, the lace-maker with her bobbin, the
weaver at his loom, all will answer the same question in the same way
by saying that they have a feeling of the proper management of the
implement in their hands.

" In these cases, the feelings which are conditions of the appropriate
acts are very faint. But none the less are they necessary. Imagine
your hands not feeling; your movements could then only be provoked
by ideas, and if your ideas were then diverted away, the movements
ought to come to a standstill, which is a consequence that seldom
occurs." *

Again :

" An idea makes you take, for example, a violin into your left hand.
But it is not necessary that your idea remain fixed on the contrac
tion of the muscles of the left hand and fingers in order that the
violin may continue to be held fast and not let fall. The sensations
themselves which the holding of the instrument awakens in the hand,
since they are associated with the motor impulse of grasping, are suf
ficient to cause this impulse, which then lasts as long as the feeling
itself lasts, or until the impulse is inhibited by the idea of some antag
onistic motion."

And the same may be said of the manner in which the right
hand holds the bow :

" It sometimes happens, in beginning these simultaneous combina
tions, that one movement or impulse will cease if the consciousness
turn particularly toward another, because at the outset the guiding
sensations must all be strongly felt. The bow will perhaps slip from
the fingers, because some of the muscles have relaxed. But the
slipping is a cause of new sensations starting up in the hand, so that
the attention is in a moment brought back to the grasping of the bow.

' ' The following experiment shows this well : When one begins to
play on the violin, to keep him from raising his right elbow in playing

* ' Der menschliche Wille,' pp. 447, 44&

120 PSYCHOLOGY.

a book is placed under his right armpit, which he is ordered to hold
fast by keeping the upper arm tight against his body. The muscular
feelings, and feelings of contact connected with the book, provoke an
impulse to press it tight. But often it happens that the beginner,
whose attention gets absorbed in the production of the notes, lets drop
the book. Later, however, this never happens; the faintest sensations
of contact suffice to awaken the impulse to keep it in its place, and the
attention may be wholly absorbed by the notes and the fingering with
the left hand. The simultaneous combination of movements is thus
in the first instance conditioned by the facility with which in us, along
side of intellectual processes, processes of inattentive feeling may still

This brings us by a very natural transition to the ethical
implications of the law of habit. They are numerous and
momentous. Dr. Carpenter, from whose ' Mental Physiol
ogy ' we have quoted, has so prominently enforced the
principle that our organs grow to the way in which they
have been exercised, and dwelt upon its consequences, that
his book almost deserves to be called a work of edification,
on this account alone. We need make no apology, then,
for tracing a few of these consequences ourselves :

" Habit a second nature ! Habit is ten times nature,"
the Duke of Wellington is said to have exclaimed ; and the
degree to which this is true no one can probably appreciate
as well as one who is a veteran soldier himself. The daily
drill and the years of discipline end by fashioning a man
completely over again, as to most of the possibilities of his
conduct.

" There is a story, which is credible enough, though it may not
be true, of a practical joker, who, seeing a discharged veteran
carrying home his dinner, suddenly called out, * Attention ! ' where
upon the man instantly brought his hands down, and lost his mutton
and potatoes in the gutter. The drill had been thorough, and its
effects had become embodied in the man's nervous structure." t

Kiderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been

seen to come together and go through their customary

I evolutions at the sound of the bugle-call. Most trained

domestic animals, dogs and oxen, and omnibus- and car-

* 'Der menschliche Wille,' p. 439. The last sentence is rather freely
translated — the sense is uualtered.

f Huxley's 'Elementary Lessons in Physiology,' lesson

xn.

HABIT. 121

horses, seem to be machines almost pure and simple, un-
doubtingly, unhesitatingly doing from minute to minute the
duties they have been taught, and giving no sign that the
possibility of an alternative ever suggests itself to their
mind. Men grown old in prison have asked to be read
mitted after being once set free. In a railroad accident to
a travelling menagerie in the United States some time in
1884, a tiger, whose cage had broken open, is said to have
emerged, but presently crept back again, as if too much
bewildered by his new responsibilities, so that he was with
out difficulty secured.

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most
precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all
within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of
fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from
being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the
winter ; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the
countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through
all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the
natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all
to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture
or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that
disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted,
and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social
strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you
see the professional mannerism settling down on the young
commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young
minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little
lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks
of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ' shop,' in a
word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape
than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of
folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It
is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty,
the character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again.

If the period between twenty and thirty is the critical
one in the formation of intellectual and professional habits,

122 PSYCHOLOGY.

the period below twenty is more important still for the fix
ing of personal habits, properly so called, such as vocaliza
tion and pronunciation, gesture, motion, and address.
Hardly ever is a language learned after twenty spoken
without a foreign accent ; hardly ever can a youth trans
ferred to the society of his betters unlearn the nasality and
other vices of speech bred in him by the associations of
his growing years. Hardly ever, indeed, no matter how
much money there be in his pocket, can he even learn to
dress like a gentleman-born. The merchants offer their
wares as eagerly to him as to the veriest ' swell,' but he
simply cannot buy the right things. An invisible law, as
strong as gravitation, keeps him within his orbit, arrayed
this year as he was the last; and how his better-bred
acquaintances contrive to get the things they wear will be
for him a mystery till his dying day.

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our

j nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund

* and capitalize our acquisitions, aiid live at ease upon the
interest of the fund. For this we must make automatic and
habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we cant
and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to
be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the

'• plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can
hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more
our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own
proper work. There is no more miserable human being
than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and
for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every

, cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and
the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express

' volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man
goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought
to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his
consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet
ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very
hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits'
there are some admirable practical remarks laid down.
Two great maxims emerge from his treatment. The first

HABIT. 123

is tliat in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off
of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as A
strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all
the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right
motives ; put yourself assiduously in conditions that en
courage the new way ; make engagements incompatible
with the old ; take a public pledge, if the case allows ; in
short, envelop your resolution with every aid you know.
This will give your new beginning such a momentum that
the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it
otherwise might ; and every day during which a breakdown
is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all.
The second maxim is : Never suffer an exception to occur
till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse
is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is care
fully winding up ; a single slip undoes more than a great
many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the
great means of making the nervous system act infallibly
right. As Professor Bain says :

"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them
from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers,
one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is
necessary, above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle.
Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on
the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the '
two opposing powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted
successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable
it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the
theoretically best career of mental progress."

The need of securing success at the outset is imperative.
Failure at first is apt to dampen the energy of all future
attempts, whereas past experience of success nerves one to
future vigor. Goethe says to a man who consulted him
about an enterprise but mistrusted his own powers : "Ach !
you need only blow on your hands ! " And the remark
illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits of his own habitu
ally successful career. Prof. Baumann, from whom I bor
row the anecdote,* says that the collapse of barbarian

* See the admirable passage about success at the outset, in his Handbuch
der Moral (1878), pp. 38-43.

124 PSYCHOLOGY.

nations when Europeans come among them is due to their
despair of ever succeeding as the new-comers do in the
larger tasks of life. Old ways are broken and new ones
not formed.

The question of 'tapering-off,' in abandoning such
habits as drink and opium-indulgence, comes in here, and
is a question about which experts differ within certain
limits, and in regard to what may be best for an individual
case. In the main, however, all expert opinion would
agree that abrupt acquisition of the new habit is the best
way, 'if there be a real possibility of carrying it out. We
must be careful not to give the will so stiff a task as to in
sure its defeat at the very outset; but, provided one can
stand it, a sharp period of suffering, and then a free time,
is the best thing to aim at, whether in giving up a habit
like that of opium, or in simply changing one's hours of
rising or of work. It is surprising how soon a desire will
die of inanition if it be never fed.

" One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor
left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one oan
begin 'to make one's self over again.' He who every day makes a
fresh resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to
leap, forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken
.advance there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces
possible, and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us
in it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work." *

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair:
Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolu
tion you make, and on every emotional prompting you may
experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It
is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment
of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspira
tions communicate the new 'set' to the brain. As the
author last quoted remarks :

"The actual presence of the practical opportunity alone furnishes the
fulcrum upon which the lever can rest, by means of which the moral
will may multiply its strength, and raise itself aloft. He who has no
solid ground to press against will never get beyond the stage of empty
gesture-making."

* J. Bahnsen : 'Beitrage zu Charakterologie ' (1867), vol. i. p. 209.

HABIT. 125

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may pos
sess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one
have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to
^act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the
better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially
paved. And this is an obvious consequence of the prin
ciples we have laid down. A ' character,' as J. S. Mill says,
lis a completely fashioned will' ; and a will, in the sense in
which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a
firm and prompt and definite way upon all the principal
emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effec
tively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted
frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the
brain ' grows ' to their use. Every time a resolve or a fine
glow of feeling evaporates without bearing practical fruit is
worse than a chance lost; it works so as positively to
hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking the
normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible
type of human character than that of the nerveless senti
mentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering -
sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly
concrete deed. Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers oft
France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their
babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the
foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.
But every one of us in his measure, whenever, after glow
ing for an abstractly formulated Good, he practically
ignores some actual case, among the squalid ' other partic
ulars ' of which that same Good lurks disguised, treads
straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods are disguised by
the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day
world ; but woe to him who can only recognize them when
he thinks them in their pure and abstract form ! The habit
of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce
true monsters in this line. The weeping of a Russian lady
over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coach
man is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of •
thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.
Even the habit of excessive indulgence in music, for those
who are neither performers themselves nor musically gifted

126 P8YGHOLOQ7.

enough to take it in a purely intellectual way, has probably
a relaxing effect upon the character. One becomes filled
with emotions which habitually pass without prompting to
any deed, and so the inertly sentimental condition is kept
up. The remedy would be, never to suffer one's self to
have an emotion at a concert, without expressing it after
ward in some active way.* Let the expression be the least
thing in the world — speaking genially to one's aunt, or
giving up one's seat in a horse-car, if nothing more heroic
' offers — but let it not fail to take place.

These latter cases make us aware that it is not simply
particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of dis
charge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain.
Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a
way of evaporating ; so there is reason to suppose that if
we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the
effort-making capacity will be gone ; and that, if we suffer
the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all
the time. Attention and effort are, as we shall see later,

*** /but two names for the same psychic fact. To what brain-
processes they correspond we do not know. The strongest
reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes
at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact,
that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit,
which is a material law. As a final practical maxim, rela
tive to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer some-

I I thing like this : Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a
little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematic
ally ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do
' every day or two something for no other reason than that
you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire
need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained
Ho stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur
ance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax
does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring
him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it
will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has

* See for remarks on this subject a readable article by Miss V. Scudde*
on 'Musical Devotees aiid Morals/ in the Andover Keview for January
1887.

HABIT. 127

daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, j ^ j^
energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. )
He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around
him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like
chaff in the blast.

The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the
most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be
endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than
the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually \/) X)
fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the /
young but realize how soon they will become mere walking
bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their con
duct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own
fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest
stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.
The drunken Kip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses
himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count ( /
this time ! ' Well ! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven
may not count it ; but it is being counted none the less.
Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are
counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against
him when the next temptation comes. Nothing v\re ever do
is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this
has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become
permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so wre
become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in
the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate f
acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety
about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may
be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working- ^/
day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can
with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morn
ing, to find himself one of the competent ones of his gen
eration, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out.
Silently, between all the details of his business, the poiver oj ^
judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up
within him as a possession that will never pass away. '
Young people should know this truth in advance. The
ignorance of it has probably engendered more discourage
ment and faint-lieartedness in youths embarking on arduous
careers than all other causes put together.

CHAPTER V.

THE AUTOMATON-THEORY.

IN describing the functions of the hemispheres a short
way back, we used language derived from both the bodily
and the mental life, saying now that the animal made inde
terminate and unforeseeable reactions, and anon that he
was swayed by considerations of future good and evil ;
treating his hemispheres sometimes as the seat of mem
ory and ideas in the psychic sense, and sometimes talk
ing of them as simply a complicated addition to his
reflex machinery. This sort of vacillation in the point of
view is a fatal incident of all ordinary talk about these
questions ; but I must now settle my scores with those
readers to whom I already dropped a word in passing (see
page 24, note) and who have probably been dissatisfied
with my conduct ever since.

Suppose we restrict our view to facts of one and the same
plane, and let that be the bodily plane : cannot all the out
ward phenomena of intelligence still be exhaustively de
scribed ? Those mental images, those ' considerations,'
whereof we spoke, — presumably they do not arise without
neural processes arising simultaneously with them, and
presumably each consideration corresponds to a process sui
generis, and unlike all the rest. In other words, however
numerous and delicately differentiated the train of ideas
may be, the train of brain-events that runs alongside of it
must in both respects be exactly its match, and we must
postulate a neural machinery that offers a living counterpart
for every shading, however fine, of the history of its owner's
mind. Whatever degree of complication the latter may
reach, the complication of the machinery must be quite as
extreme, otherwise we should have to admit that there
may be mental events to which no brain-events correspond,

138

THE AUTOMATON- THEORY, 129

But such an admission as this the physiologist is reluctant
to make. It would violate all his beliefs. ' No psychosis \
without neurosis,' is one form which the principle of con- [
tinuity takes in his mind.

But this principle forces the physiologist to make still
another step. If neural action is as complicated as mind ;
and if in the sympathetic system and lower spinal cord we
see what, so far as we know, is unconscious neural action
executing deeds that to all outward intent may be called
intelligent ; what is there to hinder us from supposing that
even where we know consciousness to be there, the still
more complicated neural action which we believe to be its
inseparable companion is alone and of itself the real agent / ^
of whatever intelligent deeds may appear ? " As actions of
a certain degree of complexity are brought about by mere
mechanism, why may not actions of a still greater degree of
complexity be the result of a more refined mechanism ?"
The conception of reflex action is surely one of the best
conquests of physiological theory ; why not be radical with
it ? Why not say that just as the spinal cord is a machine
with few reflexes, so the hemispheres are a machine with
many, and that that is all the difference ? The principle of
continuity would press us to accept this view.

But what on this view could be the function of the con
sciousness itself ? Mechanical function it would have none.
The sense-organs would awaken the brain-cells ; these
would awaken each other in rational and orderly sequence,
until the time for action came ; and then the last brain« •
vibration would discharge downward into the motor tracts. (
But this would be a quite autonomous chain of occur
rences, and whatever mind went with it would be there
only as an ' epiphenomenon,' an inert spectator, a sort of
* foam, aura, or melody ' as Mr. Hodgson says, whose oppo
sition or whose furtherance would be alike powerless over
the occurrences themselves. When talking, some time ago, <
we ought not, accordingly, as physiologists, to have said any
thing about ' considerations ' as guiding the animal. We j
ought to have said ' paths left in the hemispherical cortex '
by former currents,' and nothing more.

Now so simple and attractive is this conception from the

130 PSYCHOLOGY,

consistently physiological point of view, that it is quite
wonderful to see how late it was stumbled on in philosophy,
and how few people, even when it has been explained to
them, fully and easily realize its import. Much of the
polemic writing against it is by men who have as }^et failed
' k> take it into their imaginations. Since this has been the
case, it seems worth while to devote a few more words to
making it plausible, before criticising it ourselves.

To Descartes belongs the credit of having first been bold
enough to conceive of a completely self-sufficing nervous
mechanism which should be able to perform complicated
and apparently intelligent acts. By a singularly arbitrary
\ jj restriction, however, Descartes stopped short at man, and
while contending that in beasts the nervous machinery was
all, he held that the higher acts of man were the result
of the agency of his rational soul. The opinion that
beasts have no consciousness at all was of course too para
doxical to maintain itself long as anything more than a
curious item in the history of philosophy. And with its
i, abandonment the very notion that the nervous system per se
might work the work of intelligence, which was an integral,
though detachable part of the whole theory, seemed also to
slip out of men's conception, until, in this century, the
elaboration of the doctrine of reflex action made it possible
and natural that it should again arise. But it was not till
1870, I believe, that Mr. Hodgson made the decisive step,
by saying that feelings, no matter how intensely they may
be present, can have no causal efficacy whatever, and com
paring them to the colors laid on the surface of a mosaic, of
which the events in the nervous system are represented by
the stones.* Obviously the stones are held in place by each
other and not by the several colors which they support.

About the same time Mr. Spalding, and a little later
Messrs. Huxley and Clifford, gave great publicity to an
identical doctrine, though in their case it was backed by
less refined metaphysical considerations. t

* The Theory of Practice, vol. i, p. 416 ff.

f The present writer recalls how in 1869, when still a medical student,
he began to write an essay showing how almost every one who speculated
about brain-processes illicitly interpolated into his account of them links

A UTOMA TON- THEOR Y. 131

A few sentences from Huxley and Clifford may be sub
joined to make the matter entirely clear. Professor Huxley
says:

' ' The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the
mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working,
and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working
as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine
is without influence on its machinery. Their volition, if they have any,
is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes.
. . . The soul stands related to the body as the bell of a clock to the works,
and consciousness answers to the sound which the bell gives out when
it is struck. . . . Thus far I have strictly confined myself to the j
automatism of brutes. ... It is quite true that, to the best of my I
judgment, the argumentation which applies to brutes holds equally
good of men ; and, therefore, that all states of consciousness in us, as
in them, are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-sub- .
stance. It seems to me that in men, as in brutes, there is no proof that
any state of consciousness is the cause of change in the motion of the
matter of the organism. If these positions are well based, it follows
that our mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of
the changes which take place automatically in the organism ; and that,
to take an extreme illustration, the feeling we call volition is not the
cause of a voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the brain which
is the immediate cause of that act. We are conscious automata."

Professor Clifford writes :

' ' All the evidence that we have goes to show that the physical world
gets along entirely by itself, according to practically universal rules.
. . . The train of physical facts between the stimulus sent into the eye,
or to any one of our senses, and the exertion which follows it, and the
train of physical facts which goes on in the brain, even when there is
no stimulus and no exertion, — these are perfectly complete physical
trams, and every step is fully accounted for by mechanical conditions. •
. . . The two things are on utterly different platforms — the physical
facts go along by themselves, and the mental facts go along by them- / *'•
selves. There is a parallelism between them, but there is no interfer
ence of one with the other. Again, if anybody says that the will
influences matter, the statement is not untrue, but it is nonsense. Such
an assertion belongs to the crude materialism of the savage. The only

derived from the entirely heterogeneous universe of Feeling. Spencer,
Hodgson (in his Time and Space), Maudsley, Lockhart Clarke, Bain, Dr.
Carpenter, and other authors were cited as having been guilty of the con
fusion. The writing was soon stopped because he perceived that the view
which he was upholding against these authors was a pure conception, with
no proofs to be adduced of its reality. Later it seemed to him that what
ever proofs existed really told in favor of their view.

132 PSYCHOLOGY.

thing which influences matter is the position of surrounding matter o?
the motion of surrounding matter. ... The assertion that another
man's volition, a feeling in his consciousness that I cannot perceive, is
part of the train of physical facts which I may perceive,— this is neither
true nor untrue, but nonsense ; it is a combination of words whose cor
responding ideas will not go together. . . . Sometimes one series is
known better, and sometimes the other ; so that in telling a story we
speak sometimes of mental and sometimes of material facts. A feeling
of chill made a man run ; strictly speaking, the nervous disturbance
which coexisted with that feeling of chill made him run, if we want to
talk about material facts ; or the feeling of chill produced the form of
sub-consciousness which coexists with the motion of legs, if we want
to talk about mental facts. . . . When, therefore, we ask : « What is the
physical link between the ingoing message from chilled skin and the
outgoing message which moves the leg ? ' and the answer is, ' A man's
will,' we have as much right to be amused as if we had asked our friend
with the picture what pigment was used in painting the cannon in the
foreground, and received the answer, ' Wrought iron.' It will be found
excellent practice in the mental operations required by this doctrine to
imagine a train, the fore part of which is an engine and three carriages
linked with iron couplings, and the hind part three other carriages
linked with iron couplings ; the bond between the two parts being
made up out of the sentiments of amity subsisting between the stoker
and the guard."

To comprehend completely the consequences of the
dogma so confidently enunciated, one should unflinchingly
apply it to the most complicated examples. The move
ments of our tongues and pens, the flashings of our eyes in
conversation, are of course events of a material order, and as
such their causal antecedents must be exclusively material.
Jf we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shake
speare, and as thoroughly all his environing conditions, we
should be able to show why at a certain period of his life
his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those
crabbed little black marks which we for shortness'
sake call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should under
stand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein,
and we should understand all this without in the slightest
/ degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shake
speare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken,
not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little
outward facts, pure and simple. In like manner we might
exhaustively write the biography of those two hundred

A UTOMA TON- THEOR T. 1 33

pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter called
Martin Luther, without ever implying that it felt.

But, on the other hand, nothing in all this could pre
vent us from giving an equally complete account of either
Luther's or Shakespeare's spiritual history, an account in
which every gleam of thought and emotion should find its
place. The mind-history would run alongside of the body-
history of each man, and each point in the one would cor
respond to, but not react upon, a point in the other. So
the melody floats from the harp-string, but neither checks
nor quickens its vibrations ; so the shadow runs alongside
the pedestrian, but in no way influences his steps.

Another inference, apparently more paradoxical still,
needs to be made, though, as far as I am aware, Dr. Hodg
son is the only writer who has explicitly drawn it. That
inference is that feelings, not causing nerve-actions, cannot
even cause each other. To ordinary common sense, felt
pain is, as such, not only the cause of outward tears and
cries, but also the cause of such inward events as sorrow,
compunction, desire, or inventive thought. So the con
sciousness of good news is the direct producer of the feel
ing of joy, the awareness of premises that of the belief in
conclusions. But according to the automaton-theory, each
of the feelings mentioned is only the correlate of some nerve- 1 1 .
movement whose cause lay wholly in a previous nerve-move
ment. The first nerve-movement called up the second ;
whatever feeling was attached to the second consequently
found itself following upon the feeling that was attached
to the first. If, for example, good news was the conscious
ness correlated with the first movement, then joy turned
out to be the correlate in consciousness of the second.
But all the while the items of the nerve series were the
only ones in causal continuity ; the items of the conscious
series, however inwardly rational their sequence, were
simply juxtaposed.

REASON'S FOR THE THEORY.

The ' conscious automaton-theory,' as this conception is
generally called, is thus a radical and simple conception of
the manner in which certain facts may possibly occur. But

134 PSYCHOLOGY.

between conception and belief, proof ought to lie. And
when we ask, ' What proves that all this is more than a
mere conception of the possible ? ' it is not easy to get a
sufficient reply. If we start from the frog's spinal cord
and reason by continuity, saying, as that acts so intelli
gently, though unconscious, so the higher centres, though
conscious, may have the intelligence they show quite as
mechanically based ; we are immediately met by the exact
counter-argument from continuity, an Argument actually
urged by such writers as Pfliiger and Lewes, which starts
from the acts of the hemispheres, and says : " As these owe
their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to
be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must
really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness
lower in degree." All arguments from continuity work in
two ways : you can either level up or level down by their
means. And it is clear that such arguments as these can
eat each other up to all eternity.

There remains a sort of philosophic faith, bred like
most faiths from an aesthetic demand. Mental and physical
events are, on all hands, admitted to present the strongest
contrast in the entire field of being. The chasm which
yawns between them is less easily bridged over by the
mind than any interval we know. Why, then, not call it an
absolute chasm, and say not only that the two worlds
are different, but that they are independent ? This gives
us the comfort of all simple and absolute formulas, and it
makes each chain homogeneous to our consideration.
Yfhen talking of nervous tremors and bodily actions, we
may feel secure against intrusion from an irrelevant mental
world. When, on the other hand, we speak of feelings, we
may with equal consistency use terms always of one de
nomination, and never be annoyed by what Aristotle calls
' slipping into another kind.' The desire on the part of men
educated in laboratories not to have their physical reason
ings mixed up with such incommensurable factors as feelings
is certainly very strong. I have heard a most intelligent
biologist say : *• It is high time for scientific men to protest
against the recognition of any such thing as consciousness
in a scientific investigation." In a word, feeling constitutes

A UTOMA TON-THEOR Y. 135

the ' unscientific ' half of existence, and any one who enjoys
calling himself a ' scientist ' will be too happy to purchase
an untrammelled homogeneity of terms in the studies of his
predilection, at the slight cost of admitting a dualism '
which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an inde
pendent status of being, banishes it to a limbo of causal
inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its
part need ever be feared.

Over and above this great postulate that matters must
be kept simple, there is, it must be confessed, still another
highly abstract reason for denying causal efficacity to our
feelings. We can form no positive image of the modus
operandi of a volition or other thought affecting the cere
bral molecules.

" Let us try to imagine an idea, say of food, producing a movement,
say of carrying food to the mouth. . . . What is the method of its
action? Does it assist the decomposition of the molecules of the gray
matter, or does it retard the process, or does it alter the direction in
which the shocks are distributed ? Let us imagine the molecules of the
gray matter combined in such a way that they will fall into simpler
combinations on the impact of an incident force. Now suppose the in
cident force, in the shape of a shock from some other centre, to impinge
upon these molecules. By hypothesis it will decompose them, and they
will fall into the simpler combination. How is the idea of food to pre
vent this decomposition ? Manifestly it can do so only by increasing ,
the force which binds the molecules together. Good ! Try to imagine
the idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules together. It is impossi
ble. Equally impossible is it to imagine a similar idea loosening the
attractive force between two molecules." *

This passage from an exceedingly clever writer expresses ]
admirably the difficulty to which I allude. Combined with
a strong sense of the ' chasm ' between the two worlds, and
with a lively faith in reflex machinery, the sense of this
difficulty can hardly fail to make one turn consciousness
out of the door as a superfluity so far as one's explanations i
go. One may bow her out politely, allow her to remain as
an ' epiphenomenon' (invaluable word !), but one insists that
matter shall hold all the power.

"Having thoroughly recognized the fathomless abyss that separates
mind from matter, and having so blended the very notion into his very

* Chas. Mercier : The Nervous Svstem aud the Mind (1888), p. 9.

136 PSYCHOLOGY.

nature that there is no chance of his ever forgetting it or failing to
saturate with it all his meditations, the student of psychology has next
to appreciate the association between these two orders of phenomena.
. . . They are associated in a manner so intimate that some of the
greatest thinkers consider them different aspects of the same process.
. . . When the rearrangement of molecules takes place in the higher
regions of the brain, a change of consciousness simultaneously occurs.
. . . The change of consciousness never takes place without the change
in the brain ; the change in the brain never . . . without the change
in consciousness. But why the two occur together, or what the link is
which connects them, we do not know, and most authorities believe
that we never shall and never can know. Having firmly and tena
ciously grasped these two notions, of the absolute separateness of mind
and matter, and of the invariable concomitance of a mental change
with a bodily change, the student will enter on the study of psychology
with half his difficulties surmounted." *

Half his difficulties ignored, I should prefer to say. For
this ' concomitance ' in the midst of ' absolute separateness '
is an utterly irrational notion. It is to my mind quite in,
conceivable that consciousness should have nothing to do
with a business which it so faithfully attends. And the
question, ' What has it to do ? ' is one which psychology
has no right to ' surmount,' for it is her plain duty to con
sider it. The fact is that the whole question of interaction
and influence between things is a metaphysical question,
and cannot be discussed at all by those who are unwilling
to go into matters thoroughly. It is truly enough hard to
imagine the 'idea of a beefsteak binding two molecules
together ; ' but since Hume's time it has been equally hard
Vv-to imagine anything binding them together. The whole
notion of ' binding ' is a mystery, the first step towards the
solution of which is to clear scholastic rubbish out of the
way. Popular science talks of ' forces,' ' attractions ' or
' affinities ' as binding the molecules ; but clear science,
though she may use such words to abbreviate discourse, has
no use for the conceptions, and is satisfied when she can
express in simple ' laws ' the bare space-relations of the
molecules as functions of each other and of time. To the
more curiously inquiring mind, however, this simplified
expression of the bare facts is not enough ; there must

* On. <&. v ? t.

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 137

be a ' reason ' for them, and something must ' determine '
the laws. And when one seriously sits down to con-
^ider what sort of a thing one means when one asks

i for a ' reason,' one is led so far afield, so far away from
popular science and its scholasticism, as to see that even
such a fact as the existence or non-existence in the universe
of ' the idea of a beefsteak ' may not be wholly indifferent
to other facts in the same universe, and in particular may
have something to do with determining the distance at
which two molecules in that universe shall lie apart. If
ihis is so, then common-sense, though the intimate nature
of causality and of the connection of things in the universe

i lies beyond her pitifully bounded horizon, has the root and
gist of the truth in her hands when she obstinately holds

i to it that feelings and ideas are causes. However inade
quate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide ,
of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have
it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. ;
As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of meta
physical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no
right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject
only, as the automatists do, and to say that that causation
is unintelligible, whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes

: about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had
never been born. One cannot thus blow hot and cold. One
must be impartially naif or impartially critical. If the
latter, the reconstruction must be thorough-going or ' meta
physical,' and will probably preserve the common-sense
view that ideas are forces, in some translated form. But
Psychology is a mere natural science, accepting certain
terms uncritically as her data, and stopping short of
metaphysical reconstruction. Like physics, she must be
naive ; and if she finds that in her very peculiar field of
study ideas seem to be causes, she had better continue to
talk of them as such. She gains absolutely nothing by a
breach with common-sense in this matter, and she loses,
to say the least, all naturalness of speech. If feelings are
causes, of course their effects must be furtherances and
checkings of internal cerebral motions, of which in them
selves we are entirely without knowledge. It is probable

138 PSYCHOLOGY.

that for years to come we shall have to infer what happens
/ in the brain either from our feelings or from motor effects
which we observe. The organ will be for us a sort of vat
' in which feelings and motions somehow go on stewing
together, and in which innumerable things happen of which
we catch but the statistical result. Why, under these cir-
\ cumstances, we should be asked to forswear the language
of our childhood I cannot well imagine, especially as it is
perfectly compatible with the language of physiology. The
feelings can produce nothing absolutely new, they can only
reinforce and inhibit reflex currents which already exist,
and the original organization of these by physiological
forces must always be the ground-work of the psycho
logical scheme.

My conclusion is that to urge the automaton-theory
upon us, as it is now urged, on purely a priori and quasi.
metaphysical grounds, is an unwarrantable impertinence in
the present state of psychology.

REASONS AGAINST THE THEORY.

But there are much more positive reasons than this why
we ought to continue to talk in psychology as if conscious
ness had causal efficacy. The particulars of the distribu
tion of consciousness, so far as we know them, point to its
being efficacious. Let us trace some of them.

It is very generally admitted, though the point would
, be hard to prove, that consciousness grows the more com
plex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom.
That of a man must exceed that of an oyster. From this
point of view it seems an organ, superadded to the other
organs which maintain the animal in the struggle for exist
ence ; and the presumption of course is that it helps him
in some way in the struggle, just as they do. But it
cannot help him without being in some way efficacious and
influencing the course of his bodily history. If now it
could be shown in what way consciousness might help him,
and if, moreover, the defects of his other organs (where
consciousness is most developed) are such as to make them
need just the kind of help that consciousness would bring
provided it <were efficacious ; why, then the plausible infer-

A UTOMA TON- THEOR 7. 139

ence would be that it came just because of its efficacy — in
other words, its efficacy would be inductively proved.

Now the study of the phenomena of consciousness which
we shall make throughout the rest of this book will show
us that consciousness is at all times primarily a selecting |
agency * Whether we take it in the lowest sphere of sense,
or in the highest of intellection, we find it always doing
one thing, choosing one out of several of the materials so
presented to its notice, emphasizing and accentuating that
and suppressing as far as possible all the rest. The item
emphasized is always in close connection with some interest
felt by consciousness to be paramount at the time.

But what are now the defects of the nervous system in
those animals whose consciousness seems most highly
developed? Chief among them must be instability. The
cerebral hemispheres are the characteristically 'high'
nerve-centres, and we saw how indeterminate and unfore
seeable their performances were in comparison with those
of the basal ganglia and the cord. But this very vague
ness constitutes their advantage. They allow their pos
sessor to adapt his conduct to the minutest alterations in
the environing circumstances, any one of which may be
for him a sign, suggesting distant motives more powerful
than any present solicitations of sense. It seems as if cer
tain mechanical conclusions should be drawn from this
state of things. An organ swayed by slight impressions is
an organ whose natural state is one of unstable equilibrium.
We may imagine the various lines of discharge in the cere
brum to be almost on a par in point of permeability — what
discharge a given small impression will produce may be
called accidental, in the sense in which we say it is a mat
ter of accident whether a rain-drop falling on a moun
tain ridge descend the eastern or the western slope. It
is in this sense that we may call it a matter of accident
whether a child be a boy or a girl. The ovum is so un
stable a body that certain causes too minute for our appre-^
hension may at a certain moment tip it one way or the
other. The natural law of an organ constituted after this

* See in particular the end of Chapter IX.

140 PSYCHOLOGY.

fashion can be nothing but a law of caprice. I do not see
how one could reasonably expect from it any certain pursu
ance of useful lines of reaction, such as the few and fatally
determined performances of the lower centres constitute
within their narrow sphere. The dilemma in regard to the
nervous system seems, in short, to be of the following kind.
We may construct one which will react infallibly and cer
tainly, but it will then be capable of reacting to very few
changes in the environment — it will fail to be adapted to all
the rest. We may, on the other hand, construct a nervous
system potentially adapted to respond to an infinite variety
of minute features in the situation ; but its fallibility will
then be as great as its elaboration. We can never be sure
that its equilibrium will be upset in the appropriate direc
tion. In short, a high brain may do many things, and may
do each of them at a very slight hint. But its hair-trigger
organization makes of it a happy-go-lucky, hit-or-miss
affair. It is as likely to do the crazy as the sane thing at
, any given moment. A low brain does few things, and in
doing them perfectly forfeits all other use. The perform
ances of a high brain are like dice thrown forever on a
table. Unless they be loaded, what chance is there that
the highest number will turn up oftener than the lowest ?

All this is said of the brain as a physical machino pure
and simple. Can consciousness increase its efficiency by
loading its dice ? Such is the problem.

Loading its dice would mean bringing a more or less
constant pressure to bear in favor of those of its perform
ances which make for the most permanent interests cf the
brain's owner ; it would mean a constant inhibition of the
tendencies to stray aside.

Well, just such pressure and such inhibition are what
consciousness seems to be exerting all the while. And the
interests in whose favor it seems to exert them are its inter
ests and its alone, interests which it creates, and which,
but for it, would have no status in the realm of being what
ever. We talk, it is true, when we are darwinizing, as if
the mere body that owns the brain had interests ; we speak
about the utilities of its various organs and how they help
or hinder the body's survival ; and we treat the survival aa

AUTOMATON-THEORY. 141

if it were an absolute end, existing as such in the physical
world, a sort of actual should-be, presiding over the animal
and judging his reactions, quite apart from the presence of
any commenting intelligence outside. We forget that in
the absence of some such superadded commenting intelli
gence (whether it be that of the animal itself, or only ours
or Mr. Darwin's), the reactions cannot be properly talked
of as ' useful ' or ' hurtful ' at all. Considered merely
physically, all that can be said of them is that if they occur
in a certain way survival will as a matter of fact prove to be
their incidental consequence. The organs themselves, and
all the rest of the physical world, will, however, all the time
be quite indifferent to this consequence, and would quite as
cheerfully, the circumstances changed, compass the animal's
destruction. In a word, survival can enter into a purely
physiological discussion only as an hypothesis made by an
onlooker, about the future. But the moment you bring a
qonsciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere
hypothesis. No longer is it, " if survival is to occur, then
so and so must brain and other organs work." It has now
become an imperative decree : " Survival shall occur, and
therefore organs must so work !" Real ends appear for the
first time now upon the world's stage. The conception of
consciousness as a purely cognitive form of being, which
is the pet way of regarding it in many idealistic schools,
modern as well as ancient, is thoroughly anti-psychologi
cal, as the remainder of this book will show. Every actu
ally existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to
be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence,
vvould not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are
mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts
further them and which do not.

Now let consciousness only be what it seems to itself,
and it will help an instable brain to compass its proper
ends. The movements of the brain per se yield the means
of attaining these ends mechanically, but only out of a lot of
other ends, if so they may be called, which are not the
proper ones of the animal, but often quite opposed. The
brain is an instrument of possibilities, but of no certainties.
But the consciousness, with its own ends present to it, and

142 PSYCHOLOGY.

knowing also well which possibilities lead thereto and
which away, will, if endowed with causal efficacy, reinforce
the favorable possibilities and repress the unfavorable or
indifferent ones. The nerve-currents, coursing through the
cells and fibres, must in this case be supposed strengthened
by the fact of their awaking one consciousness and damp
ened by awaking another. Hoiu such reaction of the con
sciousness upon the currents may occur must remain at
present unsolved : it is enough for my purpose to have
shown that it may not uselessly exist, and that the matter
is less simple than the brain-automatists hold.

All the facts of the natural history of consciousness lend
color to this view. Consciousness, for example, is only
intense when nerve-processes are hesitant. In rapid,
automatic, habitual action it sinks to a minimum. Nothing
could be more fitting than this, if consciousness have the
teleological function we suppose ; nothing more meaning
less, if not. Habitual actions are certain, and being in no
danger of going astray from their end, need no extraneous
help. In hesitant action, there seem many alternative pos
sibilities of final nervous discharge. The feeling awakened
by the nascent excitement of each alternative nerve-tract
seems by its attractive or repulsive quality to determine
whether the excitement shall abort or shall become com
plete. Where indecision is great, as before a dangerous
leap, consciousness is agonizingly intense. Feeling, from
this point of view, may be likened to a cross-section of the
chain of nervous discharge, ascertaining the links already
laid down, and groping among the fresh ends presented
to it for the one which seems best to fit the case.

The phenomena of ' vicarious function ' which we studied

in Chapter II seem to form another bit of circumstantial

evidence. A machine in working order acts fatally in

one way. Our consciousness calls this the right way.

Take out a valve, throw a wheel out of gear or bend a

pivot, and it becomes a different machine, acting just as

fatally in another way which we call the wrong way. But

. the machine itself knows nothing of wrong or right : matter

i has no ideals to pursue. A locomotive will carry its train

A UTOMA TON- THEOR Y. 143

through an open drawbridge as cheerfully as to any other
destination.

A brain with part of it scooped out is virtually a new
machine, and during the first days after the operation
functions in a thoroughly abnormal manner. As a matter
of fact, however, its performances become from day to day
more normal, until at last a practised eye may be needed
to suspect anything wrong. Borne of the restoration is un
doubtedly due to ' inhibitions ' passing away. But if the
consciousness which goes with the rest of the brain, be there
not only in order to take cognizance of each functional
error, but also to exert an efficient pressure to check it if it
be a sin of commission, and to lend a strengthening hand
if it be a weakness or sin of omission, — nothing seems
more natural than that the remaining parts, assisted in
this way, should by virtue of the principle of habit grow
back to the old teleological modes of exercise for which
they were at first incapacitated. Nothing, on the contrary,
seems at first sight more unnatural than that they should
vicariously take up the duties of a part now lost without
those duties as such exerting any persuasive or coercive
force. At the end of Chapter XXVI I shall return to this
again.

There is yet another set of facts which seem explicable
on the supposition that consciousness has causal efficacy.
It is a ivell-knoivn fact that pleasures are generally asso
ciated with beneficial, pains with detrimental, experiences.
All the fundamental vital processes illustrate this law.
Starvation, suffocation, privation of food, drink and sleep,
work when exhausted, burns, wounds, inflammation, the
effects of poison, are as disagreeable as filling the hungry
stomach, enjoying rest and sleep after fatigue, exercise after
rest, and a sound skin and unbroken bones at all times, are
pleasant. Mr. Spencer and others have suggested that
these coincidences are due, not to any pre-established
harmony, but to the mere action of natural selection which
would certainly kill off in the long-run any breed of crea
tures to whom the fundamentally noxious experience seemed
enjoyable. An animal that should take pleasure in a feel-

144 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing of suffocation would, if that pleasure were efficacious
enough to make him immerse his head in water, enjoy a
longevity of four or five minutes. But if pleasures and
pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some
such d priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the
' scientific ' champions of the automaton-theory) why the
most noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrills
of delight, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing,
cause agony. The exceptions to the law are, it is true,
numerous, but relate to experiences that are either not vital
or not universal. Drunkenness, for instance, which though
noxious, is to many persons delightful, is a very exceptional
experience. But, as the excellent physiologist Fick re
marks, if all rivers and springs ran alcohol instead of water,
either all men would now be born to hate it or our nerves
would have been selected so as to drink it with impunity.
The only considerable attempt, in fact, that has been made
to explain the distribution of our feelings is that of Mr. Grant
Allen in his suggestive little work Physiological ^Esthetics ;
and his reasoning is based exclusively on that causal efficacy
of pleasures and pains which the ' double-aspect ' partisans
so strenuously deny.

Thus, then, from every point of view the circumstantial
evidence against that theory is strong. A priori analysis
of both brain-action and conscious action shows us that if
the latter were efficacious it would, by its selective emphasis,
make amends for the indeterminateness of the former; whilst
tile study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness
shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ
added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too
complex to regulate itself. The conclusion that it is use
ful is, after all this, quite justifiable. But, if it is useful,
it must be so through its causal efficaciousness, and the
automaton-theory must succumb to the theory of common-
sense. I, at any rate (pending metaphysical reconstruc
tions not yet successfully achieved), shall have no hesita
tion in using the language of common-sense throughout this
book.

CHAPTER VI.
THE MIND STUFF THEORY.

THE reader who found himself swamped with too much
metaphysics in the last chapter will have a still worse
time of it in this one, which is exclusively metaphysical.
Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate \\
effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of
psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoreti
cally they are very confused, and one easily makes the ob
scurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until
challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. When
these assumptions have once established themselves (as
they have a way of doing in our very descriptions of the
phenomenal facts) it is almost impossible to get rid of them
afterwards or to make any one see that they are not essen
tial features of the subject. The only way to prevent this
disaster is to scrutinize them beforehand and make them
give an articulate account of themselves before letting them
pass. On« of the obscurest of the assumptions of which
I speak is the assumption that our mental states are com
posite in structure, made up of smaller states conjoined.
This hypothesis has outward advantages which make it
almost irresistibly attractive to the intellect, and yet it is
inwardly quite unintelligible. Of its unintelligibility, how
ever, half the writers on psychology seem unaware. As
our own aim is to understand if possible, I make no apology
for singling out this particular notion for very explicit
treatment before taking up the descriptive part of our work.
The theory of ' mind- stuff' is the theory that our mental
states are compounds, expressed in its most radical form.

145

146 PSYCHOLOGY.

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY DEMANDS A MIND-DUST.

In a general theory of evolution the inorganic comes
first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life,
then forms of life that possess mentality, and finally those
like ourselves that possess it in a high degree. As long as
we keep to the consideration of purely outward facts, even
the most complicated facts of biology, our task as evolution.
ists is comparatively easy. We are dealing all the time with
matter and its aggregations and separations ; and although
our treatment must perforce be hypothetical, this does not
prevent it from being continuous. The point which as evo
lutionists we are bound to hold fast to is that all the new
forms of being that make their appearance are really noth
ing more than results of the redistribution of the original
and unchanging materials. The self-same atoms which,
chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and
temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains ;
and the ' evolution ' of the brains, if understood, would be
simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught
and jammed. In this story no new natures, no factors not
present at the beginning, are introduced at any later stage.

But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new
nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was
not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos.

The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounce
upon this undeniable discontinuity in the data of the world,
and many of them, from the failure of evolutionary expla
nations at this point, have inferred their general incapacity
all along the line. Every one admits the entire incommen
surability of feeling as such with material motion as
such. " A motion became a feeling ! " — no phrase that our
lips can frame is so devoid of apprehensible meaning.
Accordingly, even the vaguest of evolutionary enthusiasts,
when deliberately comparing material with mental facts,
have been as forward as any one else to emphasize the
•" chasm ' between the inner and the outer worlds.

" Can the oscillations of a molecule," says Mr. Spencer, "be repre
sented side by side with a nervous shock [he means a mental shock],
and the two b« recognized as one ? No effort enables us to assimilate

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 147

them. That a unit of feeling has nothing in common with a unit of
motion becomes more than ever manifest when we bring the two into
juxtaposition. " *

And again :

"Suppose it to have become quite clear that a shock in conscious
ness and a molecular motion are the subjective and objective faces of
the same thing; we continue utterly incapable of uniting the two, so as
to conceive that reality of which they are the opposite faces."t

In other words, incapable of perceiving in them any com
mon character. So Tyndall, in that lucky paragraph
which has been quoted so often that every one knows it by
heart :

"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding
facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought
and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously ; we
do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of
the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning,
from one to the other." I
Or in this other passage :

" We can trace the development of a nervous system and correlate
with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with
undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar
in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection
between them. . . . There is no fusion possible between the two classes
of facts— no motor energy in the intellect of man to carry it without
logical rupture from the one to the other." §

None the less easily, however, when the evolutionary
afflatus is upon them, do the very same writers leap over
the breach whose flagrancy they are the foremost to an
nounce, and talk as if mind grew out of body in a con
tinuous way. Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review of
mental evolution, tells us how " in tracing up the increase

* Psychol. § 62. f Ibid. § 272.

$ Fragments of Science, 5th ed., p. 420.

§ Belfast Address, 'Nature,' August 20, 1874, p. 318. I cannot help
remarking that the disparity between motious and feelings 011 which these
authors lay so much stress, is somewhat less absolute than at first sight
it seems. There are categories common to the two worlds. Not only tem
poral succession (as Helmholtz admits, Physiol. Optik, p. 445), but such
attributes as intensity, volume, simplicity or complication, smooth or im
peded change, rest or agitation, are habitually predicated of both physical
facts and mental facts. Where surb analogies obtain, the things do have
something- in cominoa.

148 PSYCHOLOGY.

we found ourselves passing without break from the phenomena
of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life." ' And Mr.
Tyndall, in the same Belfast Address from which we just
quoted, delivers his other famous passage :

" Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make
before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of
the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our
ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator,
have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency of
every form and quality of life." t
—mental life included, as a matter of course.

So strong a postulate is continuity ! Now this book will
tend to show that mental postulates are on the whole to be
respected. The demand for continuity has, over large tracts
of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power.
We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible
mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it
may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe
of a new nature, non-existent until then.

Merely to call the consciousness * nascent ' will not
serve our turn.:f It is true that the word signifies not yet

* Psychology, § 131. t ' Nature,' as above, 317-8.

\ ' Nascent ' is Mr. Spencer's great word. lu showing how at a certain
point consciousness must appear upon the evolving scene this author fairly
outdoes himself in vagueness.

" In its higher forms, Instinct is probably accompanied by a rudimen
tary consciousness. There cannot be co-ordination of many stimuli without
some ganglion through which they are all brought into relation. In the
process of bringing them into relation, this ganglion must be subject to
the influence of each— must undergo many changes. And the quick suc
cession of changes in a ganglion, implying as it does perpetual experiences
of differences and likenesses, constitutes the raw material of consciousness.
The implication is that as fast as Instinct is developed, some kind of con
sciousness becomes nascent." (Psychology, § 195.)

The words ' raw material ' and ' implication ' which I have italicized
aie the words which do the evolving. They are supposed to have ail the
rigor which the ' synthetic philosophy ' requires. In the following passage,
when ' impressions ' pass through a common ' centre of communication'
in succession (much as people might pass into a theatre through a turnstile)
consciousness, non-existent until then, is supposed to result :

"Separate impressions are received by the senses — by different parts of the
body. If they go no further than the places at which they are received, they
are useless. Or if only some of them are brought into relation with one an
other, they are useless. That an effectual adjustment may be made, they must
be all brought into relation with one another. But this implies some centre
of communication common to them all, through which they severally pass,-

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 149

quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between
existence and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble.
The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature
comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is quite imma
terial. The girl in ' Midshipman Easy ' could not excuse the
illegitimacy of her child by saying, *it was a little small
one.' And Consciousness, however little, is an illegiti
mate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet
professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution.

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape
must have been present at the very origin of things. Accord
ingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary phi
losophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the
nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom
of consciousness linked with it ; and, just as the material
atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing them
selves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous
process of aggregation, have fused into those larger con
sciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to
exist in our fellow-animals. Some such doctrine of
atomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable part of a
thorough-going philosophy of evolution. According to it
there must be an infinite number of degrees of conscious-

and as they cannot pass through it simultaneously, they must pass through
it in succession. So that as the external phenomena responded to become
greater in number and more complicated in kind, the variety and rapidity
of the changes to which this common centre of communication is subject
must increase — there must result an unbroken series of these changes —
there must arise a consciousness.

"Hence the progress of the correspondence between the organism and its
environment necessitates a gradual reduction of the sensorial changes to a
succession ; and by so doing evolves a distinct consciousness— & consciousness
that becomes higher as the succession becomes more rapid and the corre
spondence more complete." (Ibid. § 179.)

It is true that in the Fortnightly Review (vol. xiv. p. 716) Mr. Spencer
denies thnt he means by this passage to tell us anything about the origin of
consciousness at all. It resembles, however, too many other places in his
Psychology (e.g. §§ 43, 110, 244) not to be taken as a serious attempt to ex
plain how consciousness must at a certain point be 'evolved.' That,
when a critic calls his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer
should say he never meant anything particular by them, is simply an
example of the scandalous vagueness with which this sort of ' chromo-
philosophy ' is carried on.

150 PSYCHOLOGY.

ness, following the degrees of complication and aggrega
tion of tlie primordial mind-dust. To prove the separate
existence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect evi
dence, since direct intuition of them is not to be had, be
comes therefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism.

SOME ALLEGED PROOFS THAT MIND-DUST EXISTS.

Some of this duty we find already performed by a num
ber of philosophers who, though not interested at all in
evolution, have nevertheless on independent grounds con
vinced themselves of the existence of a vast amount ef
sub-conscious mental life. The criticism of this general
opinion and its grounds will have to be postponed for a
while. At present let us merely deal with the arguments
assumed to prove aggregation of bits of mind-stuff into
distinctly sensible feelings. They are clear and admit of a
clear reply.

The German physiologist A. Tick, in 1862, was, so far
as I know, the first to use them. He made experiments on
the discrimination of the feelings of warmth and of touch,
when only a very small portion of the skin was excited
through a hole in a card, the surrounding parts being pro
tected by the card. He found that under these circum
stances mistakes were frequently made by the patient,*
and concluded that this must be because the number of

* His own words are: " Mistakes are made in the sense that he admits
having been touched, when in reality it was radiant heat that affected his
skin. In our own before-mentioned experiments there was never any de
ception on the entire palmar side of the hand or on the face. On the back
of the hand in one case in a series of 60 stimulations 4 mistakes occurred,
in another case 2 mistakes in 45 stimulations. On the extensor side of the
upper arm 3 deceptions out of 48 stimulations were noticed, and in the case
of another individual, 1 out of 31. In one case over the spine 3 deceptions
in a series of 11 excitations were observed ; in another, 4 out of 19. On
the lumbar spine 6 deceptions came among 29 stimulations, and again 4
out of 7. There is certainly not yet enough material on which to rest a
calculation of probabilities, but any one can easily convince himself that
on the back there is no question of even a moderately accurate discrimina
tion between warmth and a light pressure so far as but small portions of
skin come into play. It has been as yet impossible to make corresponding
experiments with regard to sensibility to cold." (Lehrb. d. Anat. u
Physiol. d. Siuuesorgane (1862), p. 29.)

THE MIND- STUFF THEORY. 151

sensations from the elementary nerve-tips affected was too
small to sum itself distinctly into either of the qualities of
feeling in question. He tried to show how a different
manner of the summation might give rise in one case to the
heat and in another to the touch.

"A feeling of temperature." he says, ''arises when the intensities
of the units of feeling are evenly gradated, so that between two
elements a and 6 no other unit can spatially intervene whose intensity
is not also between that of a and b, A feeling of contact perhaps arises
when this condition is not fulfilled. Both kinds of feeling, however, are
composed of the same units."

But it is obviously far clearer to interpret such a grada
tion of intensities as a brain-fact than as a mind-fact. If
in the brain a tract were first excited in one of the ways
suggested by Prof. Tick, and then again in the other, it
might very well happen, for aught we can say to the con
trary, that the psychic accompaniment in the one case would
be heat, and in the other pain. The pain and the heat would,
however, not be composed of psychic units, but would each
be the direct result of one total brain-process. So long as
this latter interpretation remains open, Tick cannot be held
to have proved psychic summation.

Later, both Spencer and Taine, independently of each
other, took up the same line of thought. Mr. Spencer's
reasoning is worth quoting in extenso. He writes :

" Although the individual sensations and emotions, real or ideal, of
which consciousness is built up, appear to be severally simple, homo
geneous, unanalyzable, or of inscrutable natures, yet they are not so.
There is at least one kind of feeling which, as ordinarily experienced,
seems elementary, that is demonstrably not elementary. And after re
solving it into its proximate components, we can scarcely help suspect
ing that other apparently-elementary feelings are also compound, and
may have proximate components like those which we can in this one
instance identify.

" Musical sound is the name we give to this seemingly simple feeling
which is clearly resolvable into simpler feelings. Well-known experi
ments prove that when equal blows or taps are made one after another
at a rate not exceeding some sixteen per second, the effect of each is
perceived as a separate noise ; but when the rapidity with which the
blows follow one another exceeds this, the noises are no longer identified
in separate states of consciousness, and there arises in place of them a
continuous state of consciousness, called a tone- In further increasing

152 PSYCHOLOGY.

the rapidity of the blows, the tone undergoes the change of quality dis
tinguished as rise in pitch ; and it continues to rise in pitch as the blows
continue to increase in rapidity, until it reaches an acuteness beyond
which it is no longer appreciable as a tone. So that out of units of feel
ing of the same kind ~ many feelings distinguishable from one another
in quality result, according as the units are more or less integrated.

" This is not all. The inquiries of Professor Helmholtz have shown
that when, along with one series of these rapidly-recurring noises, there
is generated another series in which the noises are more rapid though
not so loud, the effect is a change in that quality known as its timbre.
As various musical instruments show us, tones which are alike in pitch
and strength are distinguishable by their harshness or sweetness, their
ringing or their liquid characters; and all their specific(peculiarities are
proved to arise from the combination of one, two, thrfee, or more, sup
plementary series of recurrent noises with the chief series of recurrent
noises. So that while the unlikenesses of feeling known as differences
of pitch in tones are due to differences of integration among the recur
rent noises of one series, the unlikenesses of feeling known as differ
ences of timbre, are due to the simultaneous integration with this series
of other series having other degrees of integration. And thus an
enormous number of qualitatively-contrasted kinds of consciousness
that seem severally elementary prove to be composed of one simple
kind of consciousness, combined and recombined with itself in multi
tudinous ways.

"Can we stop short here? If the different sensations known as
sounds are built out of a common unit, is it not to be rationally inferred
that so likewise are the different sensations known as tastes, and the
different sensations known as odors, and the different sensations known
as colors ? Nay, shall we not regard it as probable that there is a unit
common to all these strongly-contrasted classes of sensations ? If the
unlikenesses among the sensations of each class may be due to unlike
nesses among the modes of aggregation of a unit of consciousness com
mon to them all ; so too may the much greater unlikenesses between
the sensations of each class and those of other classes. There may be a
single primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds of
consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this element
with itself and the recompounding of its compounds with one another
in higher and higher degrees : so producing increased multiplicity,
variety, and complexity.

"Have we any clue to this primordial element ? I think we have.
That simple mental impression which proves to be the unit of composi
tion of the sensation of musical tone, is allied to certain other simple
mental impressions differently originated. The subjective effect pro
duced by a crack or noise that has no appreciable duration is little
else than a nervous shock. Though we distinguish such a nervous
shock as belonging to what we call sounds, yet it does not differ very
much from nervous shocks of other kinds. An electric discharge sent

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 158

through the body causes a feeling akin to that which a sudden loud re
port causes. A strong unexpected impression made through the eyes,
as by a flash of lightning, similarly gives rise to a start or shock ; and
though the feeling so named seems, like the electric shock, to have the
body at large for its seat, and may therefore be regarded as the correla'
tive rather of the efferent than of the afferent disturbance, yet on re
membering the mental change that results from the instantaneous
transit of an object across the field of vision, I think it may be perceived
that the feeling accompanying the efferent disturbance is itself reduced
very nearly to the same form. The state of consciousness so generated
is, in fact, comparable in quality to the initial state of consciousness
caused by a blow (distinguishing it from the pain or other feeling that
commences theJnstant after); which state of consciousness caused by a
blow may be tSten as the primitive and typical form of the nervous
shock. The fa'ct that sudden brief disturbances thus set up by differ
ent stimuli through different sets of nerves cause feelings scarcely
distinguishable in quality will not appear strange when we recollect that
distinguishableness of feeling implies appreciable duration; and that
when the duration is greatly abridged, nothing more is known than that
some mental change has occurred and ceased. To have a sensation of
redness, to know a tone as acute or grave, to be conscious of a taste as
sweet, implies in each case a considerable continuity of state. If tl#
state does not last long enough to admit of its being contemplated, it
cannot be classed as of this or that kind; and becomes a momentary
modification very similar to momentary modifications otherwise caused.
"It is possible, then — may we not even say probable? — that some
thing of the same order as that which we call a nervous shock is the
ultimate unit of consciousness ; and that all the unlikenes^es among
our feelings result from unlike modes of integration of this ultimate
unit. I say of the same order, because there are discernible differences
among nervous shocks that are differently caused ; and the primitive
nervous shock probably differs somewhat from each of them. And I
say of the same order, for the further reason that while we may
ascribe to them a general likeness in nature, we must suppose a great
unlikeness in degree. The nervous shocks recognized as such are vio
lent — must be violent before they can be perceived amid the proces
sion of multitudinous vivid feelings suddenly interrupted by them.
But the rapidly-recurring nervous shocks of which the different forms
of feeling consist, we must assume to be of comparatively moderate, or
even of very slight intensity. Were our various sensations and emotions
composed of rapidly-recurring shocks as strong as those ordinarily
called shocks, they would be unbearable ; indeed life would cease at
once. We must think of them rather as successive faint pulses of sub
jective change, each having the same quality as the strong pulse of
subjective change distinguished as a nervous shock." *

* Principles of Psychology, §60,

154

PSYCHOLOGY.
INSUFFICIENCY OF THESE PKOOPS.

Convincing as this argument of Mr. Spencer's may
appear on a first reading, it is singular how weak it really
is.* We do, it is true, when we study the connection be
tween a musical note and its outward cause, find the note
simple and continuous while the cause is multiple and dis
crete. Somewhere, then, there is a transformation, reduc
tion, or fusion. The question is, Where ? — in the nerve*

One second of time.

FIG. 25.

world or in the mind- world ? Really we have no experi
mental proof by which to decide ; and if decide we must,

* Oddly enough, Mr. Spencer seems quite unaware of the general func
tion of the theory of elementary units of mind-stuff in the evolutionary
philosophy. We have seen it to be absolutely indispensable, if that phi
losophy is to work, to postulate consciousness in the nebula, — the simplest
way being, of course, to suppose every atom animated. Mr. Spencer, how
ever, will have it (e.g. First Principles, § 71) that consciousness is only the
occasional result of the ' transformation ' of a certain amount of ' physical
force ' to which it is ' equivalent.' Presumably a brain must already be there
before any such ' transformation ' can take place ; and so the argument
quoted in the text stands as a mere local detail, without general bearings.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 155

analogy and a priori probability can alone guide us. Mr.
Spencer assumes that the fusion must come to pass in the
mental world, and that the physical processes get through
air and ear, auditory nerve and medulla, lower brain and
hemispheres, without their number being reduced. Figure
25, on the previous page, will make the point clear.

Let the line a — b represent the threshold of conscious^
ness : then everything drawn below that line will symbolize
a physical process, everything above it will mean a fact
of mind. Let the crosses stand for the physical blows, the
circles for theevents in successively higher orders of nerve-
cells, and tll| horizontal marks for the facts of feeling.
Spencer's argument implies that each order of cells trans
mits just as many impulses as it receives to the cells above
it ; so that if the blows come at the rate of 20,000 in a second
the cortical cells discharge at the same rate, and one unit
of feeling corresponds to each one of the 20,000 discharges.
Then, and only then, does 'integration' occur, by the
20,000 units of feeling ' compounding with themselves ' into
the 'continuous state of consciousness' represented by the
short line at the top of the figure.

Now such an interpretation as this flies in the face of
physical analogy, no less than of logical intelligibility.
Consider physical analogy first.

A pendulum may be deflected by a single blow, and swing
back. Will it swing back the more often the more we multi
ply the blows ? No ; for if they rain upon the pendulum too
fast, it will not swing at all but remain deflected in a sensi
bly stationary state. In other words, increasing the cause
numerically need not equally increase numerically the
eft'ect. Blow through a tube : you get a certain musical
note ; and increasing the blowing increases for a certain time
the loudness of the note. Will this be true indefinitely ?
No ; for when a certain force is reached, the note, instead of
growing louder, suddenly disappears and is replaced by its
higher octave. Turn on the gas slightly and light it : you
get a tiny flame. Turn on more gas, and the breadth of the
.flame increases. Will this relation increase indefinitely?
No, again ; for at a certain moment up shoots the flame
into a ragged streamer and begins to hiss. Send slowly

156 PSYCHOLOGY.

through the nerve of a frog's gastrocnemius muscle a suo
cession of galvanic shocks : you get a succession of twitches.
Increasing the number of shocks does not increase the
twitching; on the contrary, it stops it, and we have the
muscle in the apparently stationary state of contraction
called tetanus. This last fact is the true analogue of what
must happen between the nerve-cell and the sensory fibre.
It is certain that cells are more inert than fibres, and that
rapid vibrations in the latter can only arouse relatively
simple processes or states in the former. The higher
cells may have even a slower rate of explosion than the
lower, and so the twenty thousand supposejfcblows of the
outer air may be 'integrated' in the cortex into a very
small number of cell-discharges in a second. This other
diagram will serve to contrast this supposition with
Spencer's. In Fig. 26 all 'integration' occurs below the
threshold of consciousness. The frequency of cell-events
becomes more and more reduced as we approach the cells
to which feeling is most directly attached, until at last we
come to a condition of things symbolized by the larger
ellipse, which may be taken to stand for some rather
massive and slow process of tension and discharge in the
cortical centres, to which, as a ivliole, the feeling of musical
tone symbolized by the line at the top of the diagram
simply and totally corresponds. It is as if a long file

of men were to start one afte-'
the other to reach a distant point.
The road at first is good and
they keep their original distance
apart. Presently it is intersected
by bogs each worse than the last,
so that the front men get so re
tarded that the hinder ones catch
up with them before the journey
is done, and all arrive together
FIG. 26. at the goal.*

* The compounding of colors may be dealt with in an identical way.
Helmholtz has shown that if green light and red light fall simultaneously
on the retina, we see the color yellow. The mind-stuff theory would in
terpret this as a case where the feeling green and the feeling red 'com

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 157

On this supposition there are no unperceived units of
mind-stuff preceding and composing the full consciousness.
The latter is itself an immediate psychic fact and bears
an immediate relation to the neural state which is its un
conditional accompaniment. Did each neural shock give
rise to its own psychic shock, and the psychic shocks then
combine, it would be impossible to understand why sever
ing one part of the central nervous system from another
should break up the integrity of the consciousness. The
cut has nothing to do with the psychic world. The atoms
of mind-stufkouglit to float off from the nerve-matter on
either side*c^pt, and come together over it and fuse, just
as well as i^t had not been made. We know, however,
that they do not ; that severance of the paths of conduction
between a man's left auditory centre or optical centre and
the rest of his cortex will sever all communication between
the words which he hears or sees written and the rest of
his ideas.

Moreover, if feelings can mix into a tertium quid, why
do we not take a feeling of greenness and a feeling of red
ness, and make a feeling of yellowness out of them ? Why
has optics neglected the open road to truth, and wasted
centuries in disputing about theories of color-composition
which two minutes of introspection would have settled
forever ? * We cannot mix feelings as such, though we may
mix the objects we feel, and from their mixture get new
feelings. We cannot even (as we shall later see) have two
feelings in our mind at once. At most we can compare
together objects previously presented to us in distinct feel
ings ; but then we find each object stubbornly maintaining

bine ' into the tertium quid of feeling, yellow. What really occurs is no
doubt that a third kind of nerve-process is set up when the combined lights
impinge on the retina, — not simply the process of red plus the process of
green, but something quite different from both or either. Of course, then,
there are no feelings, either of red or of green, present to the mind at all ,
but the feeling of yellow which is there, answers as directly to the nerve,
process which momentarily then exists, as the feelings of green and red
would answer to their respective nerve-processes did the latter happen to be
taking place.

* Cf. Mill's Logic, book vi. chao. iv. § 3.

158 PSYCHOLOGY,

its separate identity before consciousness, whatever the
verdict of the comparison may be.*

SELF-COMPOUNDING OF MENTAL FACTS IS INADMISSIBLE.

But there is a still more fatal objection to the theory of
mental units ' compounding with themselves ' or ' integrat
ing.' It is logically unintelligible ; it leaves out the es
sential feature of all the ' combinations ' we actually know.

All the ' combinations ' which we actually know are EFFECTS,
wrought by the units said to be ' combined,' UPONSOME ENTITY
OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. Without this featu^U a medium
or vehicle, the notion of combination has noWvi

" A multitude of contractile units, by joint action, and by being all
connected, for instance, with a single tendon, will pull at the same, and
will bring about a dynamical effect which is undoubtedly the resultant
of their combined individual energies. ... On the whole, tendons are
to muscular fibres, and bones are to tendons, combining recipients of
mechanical energies. A medium of composition is indispensable to the
summation of energies. To realize the complete dependence of mechan
ical resultants on a combining substratum, one may fancy for a moment
all the individually contracting muscular elements severed from their
attachments. They might then still be capable of contracting with the
same energy as before, yet no co-operative result would be accomplished.
The medium of dynamical combination would be wanting. The mul
tiple energies, singly exerted on no common recipient, would lose
themselves on entirely isolated and disconnected efforts, "f

In other words, no possible number of entities (call them
as you like, whether forces, material particles, or mental
elements) can sum themselves together. Each remains, in
the sum, what it always was ; and the sum itself exists only
for a bystander who happens to overlook the units and to

* I find in my students an almost invincible tendency to think that we
can immediately perceive that feelings do combine. " What !" they say,
" is not the taste of lemonade composed of that of leinon plus that of
sugar?" This is taking the combining of objects for that of feelings.
The physical lemonade contains both the lemon and the sugar, but its
taste does not contain their tastes, for if there are any two things which
are certainly not present in the taste of lemonade, those are the lemon-sour
on the one hand and the sugar-sweet on the other. These tastes are
absent utterly. Ths entirely new taste which is present resembles, it is true,
both those tastes ; but in Chapter XIII we shall see that resemblance can
not always be held to involve partial identity.

i E. Montgomery, in 'Mind.' v. 18-19. See also Dp. 24-5.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 159

apprehend the sum as such ; or else it exists in the shape
of some other effect on an entity external to the sum itself.
Let it not be objected that H2 and O combine of themselves
into 'water,' and thenceforward exhibit new properties.
They do not. The ' water ' is just the old atoms in the
new position, H-O-H ; the ' new properties ' are just their
combined effects , when in this position, upon external media,
such as our sense-organs and the various reagents on which
water may exert its properties and be known.

" Aggregations are organized wholes only when they behave as such
in the presenajji other things. A statue is an aggregation of par
ticles of marb^^Bbt as such it has no unity. For the spectator it is
one; in itself ro^Pan aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant
crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. No summing
up of parts can make an unity of a mass of discrete constituents, unless
this unity exist for some other subject, not for the mass itself." *

Just so, in the parallelogram of forces, the ' forces '
themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant ; a
body is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit their
resultant effect. No more do musical sounds combine per
se into concords or discords. Concord and discord are
names for their combined effects on that external medium,
the ear.

* J. Royce, ' Mind,' vi. p. 376. Lotze has set forth the truth of this law
more clearly and copiously than any other writer. Unfortunately lie is too
lengthy to quote. See his Microco&mus, bk. ir. ch. i. § 5; Metaphysik,
§§ 242, 260 ; Outlines of Metaphysics, part n. chap. i. §§ 3, 4, 5. Compare
ulso Reid's Intellectual Powers, essay v, chap, mad Jin.,- Bowne's Meta
physics, pp. 361-76; St. J. Mivart : Nature and Thought, pp. 98-101; E.
Gurney: 'Monism,' in 'Mind.'vi. 153; and the article by Prof . Royce,
just quoted, on ' Mind-stuff and Reality.'

In defence of the mind-stuff mew , see W. K. Clifford: ' Mind,' in. 57 (re
printed in his 'Lectures and Essays,' n. 71); G. T. Fechner, Psycho
physik, Bd. n. cap. XLV; H. Taiue: on Intelligence, bk. in; E. Haeckel:
' Zellseelen u. Seelenzellen ' in Gesammelte pop. Vortrage, Bd. i. p. 143; W.
S. Duncan ; Conscious Matter, pasttim; H. Z5llner: Natur d. Cometen, pp.
320 ff.; Alfred Barratt: ' Physical Ethic 'and ' Physical Metempiric, ' pas-
wm; J. Soury: ' Hylozoismus,' in ' Kosmos,' V. Jahrg., Heft x. p. 241; A.
Main: 'Mind,' i. 292, 431, 566; n. 129, 402; Id. Revue Philos., n. 86, 88,
419; m. 51,502; iv. 402; F. W. Fraukland: 'Mind.' vi. 116; Whittaker:
'Mind,' vi. 498 (historical); Morton Prince: The Nature of Mind and
Human Automatism (1885); A. Riehl: Der philosophische Kriticismus, Bd.
n. Theil 2, 2ter Absclmitt, 2tes Cap. (1887). The clearest of all these
Statements is, as far as it goes, that of Prince.

160 PSYCHOLOGY.

"Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings,
the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them,
shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can
(whatever that may mean) ; still each remains the same feel
ing it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, igno
rant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would
be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or
series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belong
ing to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feel
ing would be a totally new fact ; the 100 original feelings
might, by a curious physical law, be a signa^tkits creation,
when they came together; but they woulc^lpive no sub
stantial identity with it, nor it with them, Ima one could
never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible
sense) say that they evolved it.

Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men
and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or
jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as
intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness
of the whole sentence.* We talk of the 'spirit of the age,'
and the ' sentiment of the people,' and in various ways we
hypostatize 'public opinion.' But we know this to be sym
bolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion,
sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other thai], and
additional to, that of the several individuals whom the
words 'age,' 'people,' or 'public' denote. The private
minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind.
This has always been the invincible contention of the
spiritualists against the associationists in Psychology, — a
contention which we shall take up at greater length in
Chapter X. The associationists say the mind is constituted

*" Someone might say that although it is true that neither a blind
man nor a deaf man by himself can compare sounds with colors, yet
since one hears and the other sees they might do so both together. . . .
But whether they are apart or close together makes no difference ; not even
if they permanently keep house together ; no, not if they were Siamese
twins, or more than Siamese twins, and were inseparably grown together,
would it make the assumption any more possible. Only when sound and
color are represented in the same reality is it thinkable that they should
be compared." (Brentano: Psychologic, p. 209.)

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 161

by a multiplicity of distinct ' ideas ' associated into a unity.
There is, they say, an idea of a, and also an idea of b.
Therefore, they say, there is an idea of a -f- &, or of a and b
together. Which is like saying that the mathematical
square of a plus that of b is equal to the square of a -\- b,
a palpable untruth. Idea of a -j- idea of b is not identical
with idea of (a -{- b). It is one, they are two ; in it, what
knows a also knows &; in them, what knows a is expressly
posited as not knowing b ; etc. In short, the two separate
ideas can never by any logic be made to figure as one and
the same tl^fl^is the 'associated' idea.

This is J^P the spiritualists keep saying ; and since we
do, as a matter of fact, have the ' compounded ' idea, and do
know a and b together, they adopt a farther hypothesis to
explain that fact. The separate ideas exist, they say, but
affect a third entity, the soul. This has the l compounded '
idea, if you please so to call it ; and the compounded idea
is an altogether new psychic fact to which the separate ideas
stand in the relation, not of constituents, but of occasions
of production.

This argument of the spiritualists against the association-
ists has never been answered by the latter. It holds good
against any talk about self-compounding amongst feelings,
against any ' blending,' or ' complication,' or ' mental
chemistry,' or 'psychic synthesis,' which supposes a re
sultant consciousness to float off from the constituents per se,
in the absence of a supernumerary principle of conscious
ness which they may affect. The mind-stuff theory, in
short, is unintelligible. Atoms of feeling cannot compose
higher feelings, any more than atoms of matter can compose
physical things! The 'things,' for a clear-headed ato
mistic evolutionist, are not. Nothing is but the everlasting
atoms. When grouped in a certain way, ive name them
this ' thing ' or that ; but the thing we name has no exist
ence out of our mind. So of the states of mind which are
supposed to be compound because they know many differ
ent things together. Since indubitably such states do exist,
they must exist as single new facts, effects, possibly, as
the spiritualists say, on the Soul (we will not decide that

162 PSYCHOLOGY.

point here), but at any rate independent and integral, and
not compounded of psychic atoms.*

CAN STATES OF MIND BE UNCONSCIOUS?

The passion for unity and smoothness is in some minds
so insatiate that, in spite of the logical clearness of these
reasonings and conclusions, many will fail to be influenced
by them. They establish a sort of disjointedness in things
which in certain quarters will appear intolerable. They

* The reader must observe that we are reasoning ab^^her about the
logic of the mind-stuff theory, about whether it can ea^KBthe constitution
of higher mental states by viewing them as identv^^Hlih lower ones
summed together. We say the two sorts of fact are not icrentical : a higher
state is not a lot of lower states ; it is itself. When, however, a lot of
lower states have come together, or when certain brain-conditions occur
together which, if they occurred separately, would produce a lot of lower
states, we have not for a moment pretended that a higher state may not
emerge. In fact it does emerge under those conditions ; and our Chapter
IX will be mainly devoted to the proof of this fact. But such emergence
is that of a new psychic entity, and is ioto coslo different from such an
'integration' of the lower states as the mind-stuff theory affirms.

It may seem strange to suppose that anyone should mistake criticism of
a certain theory about a fact for doubt of the fact itself. And yet the
confusion is made in high quarters enough to justify our remarks. Mr. J.
Ward, in his article Psychology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, speak
ing of the hypothesis that "a series of feelings can be aware of itself as
a series," says (p. 39): " Paradox is too mild a word for it, even contradiction
will hardly suffice." Whereupon, Professor Bain takes him thus to task:
" As to 'a series of states being aware of itself, I confess I see no insur
mountable difficulty. It may be a fact, or not a fact ; it may be a very
clumsy expression for what it is applied to ; but it is neither paradox nor
contradiction. A series merely contradicts an individual, or it may be
two or more individuals as coexisting ; but that is too general to exclude
the possibility of self-knowledge. It certainly does not bring the property
of self-knowledge into the foreground, which, however, is not the same
as denying it. An algebraic series might know itself, without any con
tradiction : the only thing against it is the want of evidence of the fact.'
(' Mind,' xt. 459). Prof. Bain thinks, then, that all the bother is about the
difficulty of seeing how a series of feelings can have the knowledge of
itself added to it f ! ! As if anybody ever was troubled about that. That,
notoriously enough, is a fact : our consciousness is a series of feelings to
which every now and then is added a retrospective consciousness that they
have come and gone. What Mr. Ward and I are troubled about is merely
the silliness of the mind-stuffists and associationists continuing to say that
the ' series of states ' is the ' awareness of itself ;' that if the states be posited
severally, their collective consciousness is eo ipso given ; and that we need
no farther explanation, or ' evidence of the fact.'

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 153

sweep away all chance of ' passing without break ' either
from the material to the mental, or from the lower to the
higher mental ; and they thrust us back into a pluralism of
consciousnesses — each arising discontinuously in the midst
of two disconnected worlds, material and mental — which is
even worse than the old notion of the separate creation of
each particular soul. But the malcontents will hardly try
to refute oi?r reasonings by direct attack. It is more prob
able that, turning their back upon them altogether, they
will devote themselves to sapping and mining the region
roundabou^^til it is a bog of logical liquefaction, into the
midst of NN^^V all definite conclusions of any sort may be
trusted ere J^g to sink and disappear.

Our reasonings have assumed that the ' integration ' of
a thousand psychic units must be either just the units over
again, simply rebaptized, or else something real, but then
other than and additional to those units ; that if a certain
existing fact is that of a thousand feelings, it cannot at the
same time be that of ONE feeling ; for the essence of feeling
is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels, so it must be.
If the one feeling feels like no one of the thousand, in what
sense can it be said to be the thousand ? These assumptions
are what the monists will seek to undermine. The Hegelizers
amongst them will take high ground at once, and say
that the glory and beauty of the psychic life is that in it all
contradictions find their reconciliation ; and that it is just
because the i'acts we are considering are facts of the self
that they are both one and many at the same time. With
this intellectual temper I confess that I cannot contend.
As in striking at some unresisting gossamer with a club,
one but overreaches one's self, and the thing one aims at
gets no harm. So I leave this school to its devices.

The other monists are of less deliquescent frame, and
try to break down distinctness among mental states by
making a distinction. This sounds paradoxical, but it is
only ingenious. The distinction is that between the uncon
scious and the conscious being of the mental state. It is the
sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology,
and of turning what might become a science into a tum
bling-ground for whimsies. It has numerous champions.

164 PSYCHOLOGY.

and elaborate reasons to give for itself. We must there*
fore accord it due consideration. In discussing the question :

DO UNCONSCIOUS MENTAL STATES EXIST?

it will be best to give the list of so-called proofs as briefly
as possible, and to follow each by its objection, as in scho
lastic books.*

First Proof. The minimum visibile, the minimum audibile,
are objects composed of parts. How can the whole affect
the sense unless each part does ? And yet each part does
so without being separately sensible. Leifrjta calls the
total consciousness an ' aperception,' the su^^Bd insensi
ble consciousness by the name of l petites^^eptions*

"To judge of the latter," he says, " I am accustomed to use the ex
ample of the roaring of the sea with which one is assailed when near the
shore. To hear this noise as one does, one must hear the parts which
compose its totality, that is, the noise of each wave, . . . although this
noise would not be noticed if its wave were alone. One must be affected
a little by the movement cf one wave, one must have some perception
of each several noise, however small it be. Otherwise one would not
hear that of 100,000 waves, for of 100,000 zeros one can never make a
quantity." f

Reply. This is an excellent example of the so-called
' fallacy of division,' or predicating what is true only of a
collection, of each member of the collection distributively.
It no more follows that if a thousand things together cause
sensation, one thing alone must cause it, than it follows
that if one pound weight moves a balance, then one ounce
weight must move it too, in less degree. One ounce
weight does not move it at all ; its movement begins with

* The writers about ' unconscious cerebration ' seem sometimes to mean
that and sometimes unconscious thought. The arguments which follow
are culled from various quarters. The reader will find them most sys
tematically urged by E. von Hartmann: Philosophy of the Unconscious, vol.
i, and by E, Colsenet : La vie luconsciente de 1'Esprit (1880). Consult also
T. Laycock : Mind and Brain, vol. i. chap, v (1860); W. B. Carpenter:
Mental Physiology, chap, xin; F. P. Cobbe : Darwinism in Morals and
other Essays, essay xi, Unconscious Cerebration (1872); F. Bowen: Mod
ern Philosophy, pp. 428-480 ; R. H. Hutton : Contemporary Review, vol.
xxiv. p. 201 ; J. S. Mill: Exam, of Hamilton, chap, xv; G. H. Lewes:
Problems of Life and Mind, 3d series, Prob. n. cbap. x, arid also Prob.
in. chap, ii : D. G. Thompson: A System of Psychology, chap, xxxni1
J. M. Baldwin, Hand-book of Psychology, chap. rv.

i Nouveaux Essais, Avant-propos.

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 165

the pound. At most we can say that each ounce affects
it in some way which helps the advent of that move
ment. And so each infra-sensible stimulus to a nerve
no doubt affects the nerve and helps the birth of sensa
tion when the other stimuli come. But this affection is
a nerve-affection, and there is not the slightest ground for
supposing it to be a * perception ' unconscious of itsell
" A certain quantity of the cause may be a necessary con
dition to the production of any of the effect," * when the
latter is a mental state.

Second Jf^kf'- Iu a^ acquired dexterities and habits,
secondarilj^BDmatic performances as they are called, we
do what or^finally required a chain of deliberately con
scious perceptions and volitions. As the actions still keep
their intelligent character, intelligence must still preside
over their execution. But since our consciousness seems
all the while elsewhere engaged, such intelligence must
consist of unconscious perceptions, inferences, and volitions.

Reply. There is more than one alternative explanation
in accordance with larger bodies of fact. One is that the
perceptions and volitions in habitual actions may be per
formed consciously, only so quickly and inattentively that
no memory of them remains. Another is that the conscious
ness of these actions exists, but is split-off from the rest of
the consciousness of the hemispheres. We shall find in
Chapter X numerous proofs of the reality of this split-off
condition of portions of consciousness. Since in man the
hemispheres indubitably co-operate in these secondarily
automatic acts, it will not do to say either that they occur
without consciousness or that their consciousness is that of
the lower centres, which we know nothing about. But
either lack of memory or split-off cortical consciousness
will certainly account for all of the facts.f

Third Proof. Thinking of A, we presently find our
selves thinking of C. Now B is the natural logical link
between A and C, but we have no consciousness of having
thought of B. It must have been in our mind ' wwcon-

* J. S. Mill, Exam, of Hamilton, chap. xv.
f Cf. Dugald Stewart, Elements, chap. n.

166 PSYCHOLOGY.

sciously,' and in that state affected the sequence of oui
ideas.

Reply. Here again we have a choice between more
plausible explanations. Either B was consciously there,
but the next instant forgotten, or its brain-tract alone was
adequate to do the whole work of coupling A with C, with
out the idea B being aroused at all, whether consciously
or 'unconsciously.'

Fourth Proof. Problems unsolved when we go to bed
are found solved in the morning when we wak^ Somnam
bulists do rational things. We awaken pi^^kally at an
hour predetermined overnight, etc. Uncons^HI thinking,
volition, time-registration, etc., must have presided over
these acts.

Reply. Consciousness forgotten, as in the hypnotic
trance.

Fifth Proof. Some patients will often, in an attack
of epileptiform unconsciousness, go through complicated
processes, such as eating a dinner in a restaurant and pay
ing for it, or making a violent homicidal attack. In trance,
artificial or pathological, long and complex performances,
involving the use of the reasoning powers, are executed, of
which the patient is wholly unaware on coming to.

Reply. Rapid and complete oblivescence is certainly
the explanation here. The analogue again is hypnotism.
Tell the subject of an hypnotic trance, during his trance,
that he will remember, and he may remember everything
perfectly when he awakes, though without your telling him
no memory would have remained. The extremely rapid
oblivescence of common dreams is a familiar fact.

Sixth Proof. In a musical concord the vibrations of the
several notes are in relatively simple ratios. The mind
must unconsciously count the vibrations, and be pleased by
the simplicity which it finds.

Reply. The brain-process produced by the simple ratios
may be as directly agreeable as the conscious process of
comparing them would be. No counting, either conscious
or 'unconscious,' is required.

Seventh Proof. Every hour we make theoretic judgments
and emotional reactions, and exhibit practical tendencies,

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 167

for which wre can give no explicit logical justification, but
which are good inferences from certain premises. We
know more than we can say. Our conclusions run ahead
of our power to analyze their grounds. A child, ignorant
of the axiom that two things equal to the same are equal to
each other, applies it nevertheless in his concrete judgments
unerringly. A boor will use the dictum de omni et nullo who
is unable to understand it in abstract terms.

" We seldom consciously think how our house is painted, what the
shade of it is,^hat the pattern of our furniture is, or whether the door
opens to thn^^^t or left, or out or in. But how quickly should we
notice a chai^^B any of these things ! Think of the door you have
most often opSR, and tell, if you can, whether it opens to the right or
left, out or in. Yet when you open the door you never put the hand
on the wrong side to find the latch, nor try to push it when it opens
with a pull. . . . What is the precise characteristic in your friend's step
that enables you to recognize it when he is coming ? Did you ever con
sciously think the idea, ' if I run into a solid piece of matter I shall get
hurt, or be hindered in my progress ' ? and do you avoid running into
obstacles because you ever distinctly conceived, or consciously acquired
and thought, that idea?"*

Most of our knowledge is at all times potential. We act
in accordance with the whole drift of what we have learned,
but few items rise into consciousness at the time. Many
of them, however, we may recall at will. All this co
operation of unrealized principles and facts, of potential
knowledge, with our actual thought is quite inexplicable
unless we suppose the perpetual existence of an immense
mass of ideas in an unconscious state, all of them exerting a
steady pressure and influence upon our conscious thinking,
and many of them in such continuity with it as ever and
anon to become conscious themselves.

Reply. No such mass of ideas is supposable. .But there
are all kinds of short-cuts in the brain ; and processes not
aroused strongly enough to give any ' idea ' distinct enough
to be a premise, may, nevertheless, help to determine just
that resultant process of whose psychic accompaniment the
said idea would be a premise, if the idea existed at all. A
certain overtone may be a feature of my friend's voice, and

* J. E. Maude: 'The Unconscious in Education,' in 'Education' vol
L p. 401 (1882).

168 PSYCHOLOGY.

may conspire with the other tones thereof to arouse in my
brain the process which suggests to my consciousness his
name. And yet I may be ignorant of the overtone per se,
and unable, even when he speaks, to tell whether it be there
or no. It leads me to the idea of the name ; but it pro
duces in me no such cerebral process as that to which the
' idea of the overtone would correspond. And similarly of our
learning. Each subject we learn leaves behind it a modifi
cation of the brain, which makes it impossible for the latter
to react upon things just as it did before ; an^the result of
the difference may be a tendency to act, thou^^ith no idea,
much as we should if we were consciously WRing about
the subject. The becoming conscious of tli^Tatter at will
is equally readily explained as a result of the brain-modifi
cation. This, as Wundt phrases it, is a ' predisposition ' to
bring forth the conscious idea of the original subject, a pre
disposition which other stimuli and brain-processes may
convert into an actual result. But such a predisposition is
no 'unconscious idea;' it is only a particular collocation of
\/ the molecules in certain tracts of the brain.

Eighth Proof. Instincts, as pursuits of ends by appro
priate means, are manifestations of intelligence ; but as the
ends are not foreseen, the intelligence must be unconscious.

Reply. Chapter XXIV will show that all the phenomena
of instinct are explicable as actions of the nervous system,
mechanically discharged by stimuli to the senses.

Ninth Proof. In sense-perception we have results in
abundance, which can only be explained as conclusions
drawn by a process of unconscious inference from data
given to sense. A small human image on the retina is
referred, not to a pygmy, but to a distant man of normal
size. A certain gray patch is inferred to be a white object
seen in a dim light. Often the inference leads us astray :
e.g., pale gray against pale green looks red, because we
take a wrong premise to argue from. We think a green
film is spread over everything; and knowing that under
such a film a red thing would look gray, we wrongly infer
from the gray appearance that a red thing must be there.
Our study of space-perception in Chapter XYIII will give
abundant additional examples both of the truthful andilhi'

TEE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 169

sory percepts which have been explained to result from
unconscious logic operations.

Reply. That Chapter will also in many cases refute
this explanation. Color- and light-contrast are certainly
purely sensational affairs, in which inference plays no part.
This has been satisfactorily proved by Hering,* and shall
be treated of again in Chapter XVII. Our rapid judg
ments of size, shape, distance, and the like, are best ex- \ /
plained as processes ^ i simple cerebral association. Cer
tain sense-impressions directly stimulate brain-tracts, of
whose activity ready-made conscious percepts are the
immediate psychic counterparts. They do this by a mech
anism either connate or acquired by habit. It is to be
remarked that Wundt and Helmholtz, who in their earlier
writings did more than any one to give vogue to the notion
that unconscious inference is a vital factor in sense-percep
tion, have seen fit on later occasions to modify their views
and to admit that results like those of reasoning may accrue
without any actual reasoning process unconsciously taking
place. f Maybe the excessive and riotous applications made
by Hartmann of their principle have led them to this
change. It would be natural to feel towards him as the
sailor in the story felt towards the horse who got his foot
into the stirrup, — " If you're going to get on, I must get off." V

Hartmann fairly boxes the compass of the universe with
the principle of unconscious thought. For him there is no
namable thing that does not exemplify it. But his logic
is so lax and his failure to consider the most obvious alter
natives so complete that it would, on the whole, be a
waste of time to look at his arguments in detail. The same
is true of Schopenhauer, in whom the mythology reaches
its climax. The visual perception, for example, of an
object in space results, according to him, from the intellect
performing the following operations, all unconscious. First,
it apprehends the inverted retinal image and turns it right
side up, constructing flat space as a preliminary operation ;

* Zur Lehre vom Lichtsiune (1878).

f Cf. Wundt: Ueber den Einfiuss dcr Philosoplrie, etc. — Antritlsrede
11876), pp. 10-11;— Heliiiholt/: Die Thatsacheu in der Walnuelmmug,
1879), p. 27.

170 PSYCHOLOGY.

then it computes from the angle of convergence of the eye
balls that the two retinal images must be the projection of
but a single object; thirdly, it constructs the third dimen
sion and sees this object solid; fourthly, it assigns its dis
tance; and fifthly, in each and all of these operations it gets
the objective character of what it ' constructs ' by uncon
sciously inferring it as the only possible cause of some sen
sation which it unconsciously feels.* Comment on this
seems hardly called for. It is, as I said, pure mythology.

None of these facts, then, appealed to so confidently in
proof of the existence of ideas in an unconscious state,
prove anything of the sort. They prove either that con
scious ideas were present which the next instant were
forgotten ; or they prove that certain results, similar to
results of reasoning, may bo wrought out by rapid brain-
processes to which no ideation seems attached. But there
is one more argument to be alleged, less obviously insuffi
cient than those which we have reviewed, and demanding
a new sort of reply.

Tenth Proof. There is a great class of experiences in
our mental life which may be described as discoveries that
a subjective condition which we have been having is really
something different from what we had supposed. We sud
denly find ourselves bored by a thing which we thought we
were enjoying well enough ; or in love with a person whom
we imagined we only liked. Or else we deliberately ana
lyze our motives, and find that at bottom they contain
jealousies and cupidities which we little suspected to be
there. Oar feelings towards people are perfect wells of
motivation, unconscious of itself, which introspection brings
to light. And our sensations likewise : we constantly dis
cover new elements in sensations which we have been in
the habit of receiving all our days, elements, too, which
have been there from the first, since otherwise we should
have been unable to distinguish the sensations containing
them from others nearly allied. The elements must exist,
for we use them to discriminate by ; but they must exist in

* Cf. Satz vom Grunde, pp. 59-65. Compare also F. Zolluer's Natui
der Kometen, pp. 342 ff.. ami 425

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 171

an unconscious state, since we so completely fail to single
them out.* The books of the analytic school of psychol
ogy abound in examples of the kind. Who knows the
countless associations that mingle with his each and every
thought? Who can pick apart all the nameless i'eelings
that stream in at every moment from his various internal
organs, muscles, heart, glands, lungs, etc., and compose in
their totality his sense of bodily life ? Who is aware of the
part played by feelings of innervation and suggestions of
possible muscular exertion in all his judgments of distance,
shape, and size ? Consider, too, the difference between a
sensation which we simply have and one which we attend to.
Attention gives results that seem like fresh creations ; and
yet the feelings and elements of feeling which it reveals
must have been already there — in an unconscious state.
We all know practically the difference between the so-called
sonant and the so-called surd consonants, between D, B, Z,
G, V, and T, P, S, K, F, respectively. But comparatively few
persons know the difference theoretically, until their atten
tion has been called to what it is, when they perceive it
readily enough. The sonants are nothing but the surds
plus a certain element, which is alike in all, superadded.
That element is the laryngeal sound with which they are
uttered, surds having no such accompaniment. When we
hear the sonant letter, both its component elements must
really be in our mind ; but we remain unconscious of what
they rerlly are, and mistake the letter for a simple quality
of sound until an effort of attention teaches us its two com
ponents. There exist a host of sensations which most men
pass through life and never attend to, and consequently
have only in an unconscious way. The feelings of opening
and closing the glottis, of making tense the tympanic mem
brane, of accommodating for near vision, of intercepting the
passage from the nostrils to the throat, are instances of
what I mean. Every one gets these feelings many times an
hour ; but few readers, probably, are conscious of exactly
^hat sensations are meant by the names I have just used.
All these facts, and an enormous number more, seem to

* Cf. the statements from Helmholtz to be found later iu Chapter
XIII.

172 PSYCHOLOGY.

prove conclusively that, in addition to the fully conscious
way in which an idea may exist in the mind, there is also
an unconscious way ; that it is unquestionably the same
identical idea which exists in these two ways ; and that
therefore any arguments against the mind-stuff theory,
based on the notion that esse in our mental life is sentiri,
and that an idea must consciously be felt as what it is, fall
to the ground.

Objection. These reasonings are one tissue of confusion.
Two states of mind which refer to the same external reality,
or two states of mind the later one of which refers to the
earlier, are described as the same state of mind, or ' idea,'
published as it were in two editions ; and then whatever
qualities of the second edition are found openly lacking in
the first are explained as having really been there, only in
an * unconscious' way. It would be difficult to believe that
intelligent men could be guilty of so patent a fallacy, were
not the history of psychology there to give the proof. The
psychological stock-in-trade of some authors is the belief
that two thoughts about one thing are virtually the same
thought, and that this same thought may in subsequent
reflections become more and more conscious of what it really
was all along from the first. But once make the distinc
tion between simply having an idea at the moment of its pres
ence and subsequently knowing all sorts of things about it ;
make moreover that between a state of mind itself, taken
as a subjective fact, on the one hand, and the objective
thing it knows, on the other, and one has no difficulty in
escaping from the labyrinth.

Take the latter distinction first : Immediately all the
arguments based on sensations and the new features in
them which attention brings to light fall to the ground.
The sensations of the B and the V when we attend to these
sounds and analyze out the laryngeal contribution which
makes them differ from P and F respectively, are different
sensations from those of the B and the V taken in a simple
way. They stand, it is true, for the same letters, and thus
mean the same outer realities; but they are different mental
affections, and certainly depend on widely different processes
of cerebral activity. It is unbelievable that two mentaJ

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 173

states so different as the passive reception of a sound as a
whole, and the analysis of that whole into distinct ingre
dients by voluntary attention, should be due to processes
at all similar. And the subjective difference does not con
sist in that the first-named state is the second in an ' un
conscious ' form. It is an absolute psychic difference, even
greater than that between the stages to which two different
surds will give rise. The same is true of the other sensa
tions chosen as examples. The man who learns for the
first time how the closure of his glottis feels, experiences in
this discovery an absolutely new psychic modification, the
like of which he never had before. He had another feeling
before, a feeling incessantly rerewed, and of which the same
glottis was the organic starting _, oint ; but that was not the
later feeling in an ' unconscious state ; it was a feeling sui
generis altogether, although it took cognizance of the same
bodily part, the glottis. "We shall see, hereafter, that the
same reality can be cognized by an endless number of
psychic states, which may differ toto coelo among themselves,
without ceasing on that account to refer to the reality in
question. Each of them is a conscious fact : none of them
has any mode of being whatever except a certain way of
being felt at the moment of being present. It is simply
unintelligible and fantastical to say, because they point to
the same outer reality, that they must therefore be so many
editions of the same ' idea/ now in a conscious and now in
an 'unconscious' phase. There is only one 'phase' in
which an idea can be, and that is a fully conscious condi
tion. If it is not in that condition, then it is not at all.
Something else is, in its place. The something else may be
a merely physical brain-process, or it may be another con-
scious idea. Either of these things may perform much tha
same function as the first idea, refer to the same object,
and roughly stand in the same relations to the upshot of
our thought. But that is no reason why wo should throw
away the logical principle of identity in psychology, and
say that, however it may fare in the outer world, the mind
at any rate is a place in which a thing can be all kinds of
other things without ceasing to be itself as well.

Now take the other cases alleged, and the other distinc

174 PSYCHOLOGY.

tion, that namely between having a mental state and know
ing all about it. The truth is here even simpler to unravel.
When I decide that I have, without knowing it, been for
several weeks in love, I am simply giving a name to a state
which previously / have not named, but which was fully con
scious ; which had no residual mode of being except the
manner in which it was conscious ; and which, though it was
a feeling towards the same person for whom I now have a
much more inflamed feeling, and though it continuously led
into the latter, and is similar enough to be called by the
same name, is yet in no sense identical with the latter, and
least of all in an * unconscious ' way. Again, the feelings from
our viscera and other dimly-felt organs, the feelings of
innervation (if such there ?e), and those of muscular exer
tion which, in our spatial judgments, are supposed uncon
sciously to determine what we shall perceive, are just exactly
what we feel them, perfectly determinate conscious states,
not vague editions of other conscious states. They may be
faint and weak ; they may be very vague cognizers of the
same realities which other conscious states cognize and name
exactly ; they may be unconscious of much in the reality
which the other states are conscious of. But that does not
make them in themselves a whit dim or vague or uncon
scious. They are eternally as they feel when they exist,
and can, neither actually nor potentially, be identified with
anything else than their own faint selves. A faint feeling
may be looked back upon and classified and understood iu
its relations to what went before or after it in the stream of
thought. But it, on the one hand, and the later state of
mind which knows all these things about it, on the other,
are surely not two conditions, one conscious and the other
* unconscious,' of the same identical psychic fact. It is the
destiny of thought thai, on the whole, our early ideas are
superseded by later onos, giving fuller accounts of the same
realities. But none the less do the earlier and the later
ideas preserve their own several substantive identities as so
many several successive states of mind. To believe the con
trary would make any definite science of psychology im
possible. The only identity to be found among our suc
cessive ideas is their similarity of cognitive or represents

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 175

fcive function as dealing with the same objects. Identity oi
being, there is none ; and I believe that throughout the rest
of this volume the reader will reap the advantages of the
simpler way of formulating the facts which is here begun.*

So we seem not only to have ascertained the unintelli-
gibility of the notion that a mental fact can be two things
at once, and that what seems like one feeling, of blueness
for example, or of hatred, may really and ' unconsciously '
be ten thousand elementary feelings which do not resem
ble blueness or hatred at all, but we find that we can
express all the observed facts in other ways. The mind-

* The text was written before Professor Lipps's Grundtatsachen des See-
lenlebeus (1883) came into my hands. In Chapter III of that book the
notion of unconscious thought is subjected to the clearest and most search
ing criticism which it has yet received, Some passages are so similar to
what I have myself written that I must quote them in a note. After
proving that dimness and clearness, incompleteness and completeness do
not pertain to a state of mind as such — since every state of mind must be
txactly what it is, and nothing else — but only pertain to the way in which
states of mind stand for objects, which they more or less dimly, more
or less clearly, represent ; Lipps takes the case of those sensations which
attention is said to make more clear. "I perceive an object," he says,
" now in clear daylight, and again at night. Call the content of the day-
perception a, and that of the evening-perception a1. There will probably
be a considerable difference between a and a1. The colors of a will be
varied and intense, and will be sharply bounded by each other ; those of
a1 will be less luminous, and less strongly contrasted, and will approach
a common gray or brown, and merge more into each other. Both percepts,
however, as such, are completely determinate and distinct from all others.
The colors of a1 appear before my eye neither more nor less decidedly dark
and blurred than the colors of a appear bright and sharply bounded. But
now I know, or believe I know, that one and the same real Object A corre
sponds to both a and a}. I am convinced, moreover, that a represents A
better than does a1. Instead, however, of giving to my conviction this, its
only correct, expression, and keeping the content of my consciousness and
the real object, the representation and what it means, distinct from each
other, I substitute the real object for the content of the consciousness,
and talk of the experience as if it consisted in one and the same object
(namely, the surreptitiously introduced real one), constituting twice over
the content of my consciousness, once in a clear and distinct, the other
time in an obscure and vague fashion. I talk now of a distiucter and of a
less distinct consciousness of A, whereas I am only justified in talking of
two consciousnesses, a and a}, equally distinct in se, but to which the sup
posed external obiect A corresponds with different degrees of distinctness."
(P. 38-9 )

176 PSYCHOLOGY.

stuff theory, however, though scotched, is, we may be sure,
not killed. If we ascribe consciousness to unicellular
animalcules, then single cells can have it, and analogy
should make us ascribe it to the several cells cf the brain,
each individually taken. And what a convenience would it
not be for the psychologist if, by the adding together of vari
ous doses of this separate-cell-consciousness, he could treat
thought as a kind of stuff or material, to be measured out
in great or small amount, increased and subtracted from,
and baled about at will ! He feels an imperious craving
to be allowed to construct synthetically the successive
mental states which he describes. The mind-stuff theory
so easily admits of the construction being made, that it
seems certain that ' man's unconquerable mind ' will devote
much future pertinacity and ingenuity to setting it on its
legs again and getting it into some sort of plausible work
ing-order. I will therefore conclude the chapter with some
consideration of the remaining difficulties which beset the
matter as it at present stands.

DIFFICULTY OF STATING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MIND
AND BRAIN.

It will be remembered that in our criticism of the theory
of the integration of successive conscious units into a feel
ing of musical pitch, we decided that whatever integration
there was was that of the air-pulses into a simpler and sim
pler sort of physical effect, as the propagations of material
change got higher and higher in the nervous system. At
last, we said (p. 23), there results some simple and massive
process in the auditory centres of the hemispherical cortex,
to which, as a ivhole, the feeling of musical pitch directly
corresponds. Already, in discussing the localization of
functions in the brain, I had said (pp. 158-9) that conscious
ness accompanies the stream of innervation through that
organ and varies in quality with the character of the cur
rents, being mainly of things seen if the occipital lobes are
much involved, of things heard if the action is focalized in
the temporal lobes, etc., etc.; and I had added that a vague
formula like this was as much as one could safely venture
on in the actual state of physiology. The facts of mental

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 177

deafness and blindness, of auditory and optical aphasia,
show us that the whole brain must act together if certain
thoughts are to occur. The consciousness, which is itself
an integral thing not made of parts, ' corresponds ' to the
entire activity of the brain, whatever that may be, at the
moment. This is a way of expressing the relation of mind
and brain from which I shall not depart during the re
mainder of the book, because it expresses the bare
phenomenal fact with no hypothesis, and is exposed to no
such logical objections as we have found to cling to the
theory of ideas in combination.

Nevertheless, this formula which is so unobjectionable
if taken vaguely, positivistically, or scientifically, as a
mere empirical law of concomitance between our thoughts
and our brain, tumbles to pieces entirely if we assume
to represent anything more intimate or ultimate by it.
The ultimate of ultimate problems, of course, in the
study of the relations of thought and brain, is to under
stand why and how such disparate things are connected
at all. But before that problem is solved (if it ever is
solved) there is a less ultimate problem which must first
be settled. Before the connection of thought and brain
can be explained, it must at least be stated in an elementary
form ; and there are great difficulties about so stating it.
To state it in elementary form one must reduce it to its
lowest terms and know which mental fact and which cerebral
fact are, so to speak, in immediate juxtaposition. We must
find the minimal mental fact whose being reposes directly
on a brain-fact ; and we must similarly find the minimal
brain-event which will have a mental counterpart at all.
Between the mental and the physical minima thus found
there will be an immediate relation, the expression of
which, if we had it, would be the elementary psycho-pnysic
law.

Our own formula escapes the unintelligibility of psychic
atoms by taking t/ie entire thought (even of a complex
object) as the minimum with which it deals on the mental
side. But in taking the entire brain-process as its mini
mal fact on the material side it confronts other difficulties
almost as bad-

178 PSYCHOLOGY.

In the first place, it ignores analogies on which certain
critics will insist, those, namely, between the composition
of the total brain-process and that of the object of the
thought. The total brain-process is composed of parts,
of simultaneous processes in the seeing, the hearing, the
feeling, and other centres. The object thought of is also
composed of parts, some of which are seen, others heard,
others perceived by touch and muscular manipulation.
" How then," these critics will say, " should the thought
not itself be composed of parts, each the counterpart
of a part of the object and of a part of the brain-pro
cess?" So natural is this way of looking at the matter
that it has given rise to what is on the whole the most
flourishing of all psychological systems — that of the Lock-
ian school of associated ideas — of which school the mind-
stuff theory is nothing but the last and subtlest offshoot.

The second difficulty is deeper still. The ' entire brain-
process ' is not a physical fact at all. It is the appearance to
an onlooking mind of a multitude of physical facts. ' En
tire brain ' is nothing but our name for the way in which a
million of molecules arranged in certain positions may
affect our sense. On the principles of the corpuscular or
mechanical philosophy, the only realities are the separate
molecules, or at most the cells. Their aggregation into
a ' brain ' is a fiction of popular speech. Such a fiction
cannot serve as the objectively real counterpart to any
psychic state whatever. Only a genuinely physical fact can
so serve. But the molecular fact is the only genuine physi
cal fact — whereupon we seem, if we are to have an elemen
tary psycho-physic law at all, thrust right back upon some
thing like the mind-stuff theory, lor the molecular fact,
being an element of the « brain,' would seem naturally to
correspond, not to the total thoughts, but to elements in
the thought.

What shall we do? Many would find relief at this
point in celebrating the mystery of the Unknowable and the
* awe ' which we should feel at having such a principle to
take final charge of our perplexities. Others would rejoice
that the finite and separatist view of things with which we
started had at last developed its contradictions, and was

THE MIND-STUFF THEORY. 179

about to lead us dialectically upwards to some 'higher
synthesis ' in which inconsistencies cease from troubling
and logic is at rest. It may be a constitutional infirmity,
but I can take no comfort in such devices for making a
luxury of intellectual defeat. They are but spiritual
chloroform. Better live on the ragged edge, better gnaw
the file forever !

THE MATERIAL-MONAD THEORY.

The most rational thing to do is to suspect that there
may be a third possibility, an alternative supposition which
we have not considered. Now there is an alternative sup*
position — a supposition moreover which has been fre
quently made in the history of philosophy, and which is
freer from logical objections than either c£ the views w©
have ourselves discussed. It may be called the theory of
polyzoism or multiple monadism; and it conceives tho matter
thus :

Every brain-cell has its own individual consciousness,
which no other cell knows anything about, all individual
consciousnesses being ' ejective ' to each other. There is,
however, among the cells one central or pontifical one to
which our consciousness is attached. But the events of all the
other cells physically influence this arch-cell ; and through
producing their joint effects on it, these other cells may be
said to 'combine.' The arch-cell is, in fact, one of those
' external media ' without which we saw that no fusion or
integration of a number of things can occur. The physical
modifications of the arch-cell thus form a sequence of
results in the production whereof every other cell has a
share, so that, as one might say, every other cell is repre
sented therein. And similarly, the conscious correlates to
these physical modifications form a sequence of thoughts
or feelings, each one of which is, as to its substantive
being, an integral and uncompounded psychic thing, but
each one of which may (in the exercise of its cognitive
function) be aware of THINGS many and complicated in
proportion to the number of other cells that have helped
to modify the central cell.

Bv a conception of this sort, one incurs neither of the

180 PSYCHOLOGY.

internal contradictions which we found to beset the other
two theories. One has no unintelligible self-combining of
psychic units to account for on the one hand ; and on the
other hand, one need not treat as the physical counterpart
of the stream of consciousness under observation, a ' total
brain-activity ' which is non-existent as a genuinely physi
cal fact. But, to offset these advantages, one has physio
logical difficulties and improbabilities. There is no cell
or group of cells in the brain of such anatomical or func
tional pre-eminence as to appear to be the keystone or centre
of gravity of the whole system. And even if there were
such a cell, the theory of multiple monadism would, in
strictness of thought, have no right to stop at it and treat
it as a unit. The cell is no more a unit, materially con
sidered, than the total brain is a unit. It is a compound of
molecules, just as the brain is a compound of cells and fibres.
And the molecules, according to the prevalent physical theo
ries, are in turn compounds of atoms. The theory in ques
tion, therefore, if radically carried out, must set up for its
elementary and irreducible psycho-physic couple, not the
cell and its consciousness, but the primordial and eternal
atom and its consciousness. We are back at Leibnitzian
monadism, and therewith leave physiology behind us and
dive into regions inaccessible to experience and verification ;
and our doctrine, although not self-contradictory, becomes
so remote and unreal as to be almost as bad as if it were.
Speculative minds alone will take an interest in it ; and
metaphysics, not psychology, will be responsible for its
career. That the career may be a successful one must be
admitted as a possibility — a theory which Leibnitz, Her-
bart, and Lotze have taken under their protection must
have some sort of a destiny.

THE SOUL-THEORY.

But is this my last word? By no means. Many
readers have certainly been saying to themselves for the
last few pages : " Why on earth doesn't the poor man say
the Soul and have done with it ? " Other readers, of anti-
spiritualistic training and prepossessions, advanced think
ers, or popular evolutionists, will perhaps be a little sur-

THE MIND- STUFF THEORY. 181

prised to find this much-despised word now sprung upon
them at the end of so physiological a train of thought. But
the plain fact is that all the arguments for a ' pontifical cell '
or an ' arch-monad ' are also arguments for that well-known
spiritual agent in which scholastic psychology and com
mon-sense have always believed. And my only reason for
beating the bushes so, and not bringing it in earlier as a
possible solution of our difficulties, has been that by this
procedure I might perhaps force some of these materialistic
minds to feel the more strongly the logical respectability of
the spiritualistic position. The fact is that one cannot
atiord to despise any of these great traditional objects of
belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great
drift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their
direction. If there be such entities as Souls in the universe,
they may possibly be affected by the manifold occurrences
that go on in the nervous centres. To the state of the en
tire brain at a given moment they may respond by inward
modifications of their own. These changes of state may be
pulses of consciousness, cognitive of objects few or many,
simple or complex. The soul would be thus a medium
upon which (to use our earlier phraseology) the manifold
brain-processes combine their effects. Not needing to con
sider it as the ' inner aspect ' of any arch-molecule or brain-
cell, we escape that physiological improbability ; and as its
pulses of consciousness are unitary and integral affairs from
the outset, we escape the absurdity of supposing feelings
which exist separately and then ' fuse together ' by them
selves. The separateness is in the brain-world, on this
theory, and the unity in the soul-world ; and the only
trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one of
understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can
affect or influence another at all. This trouble, however,
since it also exists inside of both worlds, and involves
neither physical improbability nor logical contradiction, is
relatively small.

I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in
some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to
them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the
line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained.

182 PSYCHOLOGY.

If it does not strictly explain anything, it is at any rate
less positively objectionable fchan either mind-stuff or a
material-monad creed. The bare PHENOMENON, hoivever, the
IMMEDIATELY KNOWN thing which on the mental side is in appo
sition ivith the entire brain-process is the state of consciousness
and not the soul itself. Many of the stanchest believers in
the soul admit that we knc w it only as an inference from
experiencing its states. In Chapter X, accordingly, we must
return to its consideration again, and ask ourselves whether,
after all, the ascertainment of a blank unmediated correspond
ence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness
with the succession of total brain-processes, be not the simplest
psycho-physic formula, and the last word of a psychology
ivhich contents itself ivith verifiable laivs, and seeks only to
be clear, and to avoid unsafe hypotheses. Such a mere ad
mission of the empirical parallelism will there appear the
wisest course. By keeping to it, our psychology will re
main positivistic and non-metaphysical ; and although this
is certainly only a provisional halting-place, and things
must some day be more thoroughly thought out, we shall
abide there in this book, and just as we have rejected mind-
dust, we shall take no account of the soul. The spiritualis
tic reader may nevertheless believe in the soul if he will ;
whilst the positivistic one who wishes to give a tinge of
mystery to the expression of his positivism can continue to
say that nature in her unfathomable designs has mixed us
of clay and flame, of brain and mind, that the two things
hang indubitably together and determine each other's being,
but how or why, no mortal may ever know.

CHAPTEB VII.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY

WE have now finished the physiological preliminaries of
our subject and must in the remaining chapters study the
mental states themselves whose cerebral conditions and
concomitants we have been considering hitherto. Beyond
the brain, however, there is an outer world to which the
brain-states themselves * correspond.' And it will be well,
ere we advance farther, to say a word about the relation of
the mind to this larger sphere of physical fact.

PSYCHOLOGY IS A NATURAL SCIENCE.

That is, the mind which the psychologist studies is the
mind of distinct individuals inhabiting definite portions of
a real space and of a real time. With any other sort of
mind, absolute Intelligence, Mind unattached to a particular
body, or Mind not subject to the course of time, the psychol
ogist as such has nothing to do. * Mind,' in his mouth, is
only a class name for minds. Fortunate will it be if his
more modest inquiry result in any generalizations which
the philosopher devoted to absolute Intelligence as such
can use.

To the psychologist, then, the minds he studies are
objects, in a world of other objects. Even when he intro-
spectively analyzes his own mind, and tells what he finds
there, he talks about it in an objective way. He says, for
instance, that under certain circumstances the color gray
appears to him green, and calls the appearance an illusion.
This implies that he compares two objects, a real color
seen under certain conditions, and a mental perception
which he believes to represent it, and that he declares the
relation between them to be of a certain kind. In making
this critical judgment, the psychologist stands as much out
side of the perception which he criticises as he does of the
color. Both are his objects. And if this is true of him when

183

184 PSYCHOLOGY.

lie reflects on liis own conscious states, how much truer is it
when he treats of those of others ! In German philosophy
since Kant the word Urkenntnisstheorie, criticism of the
faculty of knowledge, plays a great part. Now the psychol
ogist necessarily becomes such an Erkenntnisstheoretiker.
But the knowledge he theorizes about is not the bare
function of knowledge which Kant criticises — he does not
inquire into the possibility of knowledge uberhaupt. He
assumes it to be possible, he does not doubt its presence
in himself at the moment he speaks. The knowledge he
criticises is the knowledge of particular men about the
particular things that surround them. This he may, upon
occasion, in the light of his own unquestioned knowledge,
pronounce true or false, and trace the reasons by which it
has become one or the other.

It is highly important that this natural-science point
of view should be understood at the outset. Otherwise
more may be demanded of the psychologist than he ought
to be expected to perform.

A diagram will exhibit more emphatically what the
assumptions of Psychology must be :

1

The
Psychologist

2

The Thought
Studied

3

The Thought's
Object

4
The Psycholo
gist's Reality

These four squares contain the irreducible data of
psychology. No. 1, the psychologist, believes Nos. 2, 3,
and 4, which together form his total object, to be realities,
and reports them and their mutual relations as truly as he
can without troubling himself with the puzzle of how he
can report them at all. About such ultimate puzzles he in
the main need trouble himself no more than the geometer,
the chemist, or the botanist do, who make precisely the
same assumptions as he.*

Of certain fallacies to which the psychologist is exposed
by reason of his peculiar point of view — that of being a

* On the relation between Pyschology and General Philosophy, see G.
C. Robertson, 'Mind,' vol. vm. p. 1, and J. Ward, $>id. p. 153 ; J. Dewey,
ibid. vol. ix. p. 1.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 185

reporter of subjective as well as of objective facts, we must
presently speak. But not until we have considered the
methods he uses for ascertaining what the facts in question
are.

THE METHODS OF INVESTIGATION.

Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first
and foremost and always. The word introspection need
hardly be defined — it means, of course, the looking into our
own minds and reporting what we there discover. Every
one, agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. So
far as I know, the existence of such states has never been'
doubted by any critic, however sceptical in other respects
he may have been. That we have cogitations of some sort is
the inconcussum in a world most of whose other facts have
at some time tottered in the breath of philosophic doubt.
All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves
thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an
inward activity or passion, from all the objects with which
it may cognitively deal. / regard this belief as the most }.;
fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology, and shall dis
card all curious inquiries about its certainty as too meta
physical for the scope of this book.

A Question of Nomenclature. We ought to have some
general term by which to designate all states of con
sciousness merely as such, and apart from their par
ticular quality or cognitive function. Unfortunately most
of the terms in use have grave objections. ' Mental
state,' ' state of consciousness,' ' conscious modification,' are
cumbrous and have no kindred verbs. The same is true
of 'subjective condition.' 'Feeling' has the verb 'to feel,'
both active and neuter, and such derivatives as ' feelingly,'
'felt,' 4'eltness,' etc., which make it extremely convenient.
But on the other hand it has specific meanings as well as
its generic one, sometimes standing for pleasure and pain,
and being sometimes a synonym of ' sensation ' as opposed
to thought ; whereas we wish a term to cover sensation and

186 PSYCHOLOGY.

thought indifferently. Moreover, ' feeling ' has acquired in
the hearts of platonizing thinkers a very opprobrious set of
implications ; and since one of the great obstacles to mutual
understanding in philosophy is the use of words eulogisti-
cally and disparagingly, impartial terms ought always, if
possible, to be preferred. The word psychosis has been
proposed by Mr. Huxley. It has the advantage of being
correlative to neurosis (the name applied by the same author
to the corresponding nerve-process), and is moreover tech
nical and devoid of partial implications. But it has no
)/ verb or other grammatical form allied to it. The expres
sions ' affection of the soul,' * modification of the ego,' are
clumsy, like 'state of consciousness,' and they implicitly
assert theories which it is not well to embody in terminol
ogy before they have been openly discussed and approved.
' ' Idea ' is a good vague neutral word, and was by Locke
employed in the broadest generic way ; but notwithstanding
his authority it has not domesticated itself in the language
so as to cover bodily sensations, and it moreover has no
verb. ' Thought ' would be by far the best word to use if
it could be made to cover sensations. It has no opprobri
ous connotation such as ' feeling ' has, and it immediately
suggests the omnipresence of cognition (or reference to an
' object other than the mental state itself), which we shall
^soon see to be of the mental life's essence. But can the
'expression 'thought of a toothache' ever suggest to the
reader the actual present pain itself ? It is hardly possi
ble ; and we thus seem about to be forced back on some
pair of terms like Hume's ' impression and idea,' or Ham
ilton's 'presentation and representation,' or the ordinary
' feeling and thought,' if we wish to cover the whole ground.
In this quandary we can make no definitive choice, but
must, according to the convenience of the context, use
sometimes one, sometimes another of the synonyms that
have been mentioned. My oivn partiality is for either
FEELING or THOUGHT. I shall probably often use both words
in a wider sense than usual, and alternately startle two
classes of readers by their unusual sound ; but if the con
nection makes it clear that mental states at large, irrespec-

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 187

tive of their kind, are meant, this will do no harm, and may
even do some good.*

The inaccuracy of introspective observation has been made
a subject of debate. It is important to gain some fixed
ideas on this point before we proceed.

The commonest spiritualistic opinion is that the Soul
or Subject of the mental life is a metaphysical entity, inac
cessible to direct knowledge, and that the various mental
states and operations of which we reflectively become
aware are objects of an inner sense which does not lay hold
of the real agent in itself, any more than sight or hear-'
ing gives us direct knowledge of matter in itself. From,
this point of view introspection is, of course, incompetent
to lay hold of anything more than the Soul's phenomena.
But even then the question remains, How well can it know
the phenomena themselves ?

Some authors take high ground here and claim for it a
sort of infallibility. Thus Ueberweg :

" When a mental image, as such, is the object of my apprehension,
there is no meaning in seeking to distinguish its existence in my con
sciousness (in me) from its existence out of my consciousness (in itself) ;
for the object apprehended is, in this case, one which does not even
exist, as the objects of external perception do, in itself outside of my
consciousness. It exists only within me." t

And Brentano :

" The phenomena inwardly apprehended are true in themselves,
As they appear — of this the evidence with which they are apprehended
is a warrant — so they are in reality. Who, then, can deny that in this
a great superiority of Psychology over the physical sciences comes to
light ?"

And again :

" No one can doubt whether the psychic condition he apprehends in
himself \e, and be so, as he apprehends it. Whoever should doubt this
would have reached that finished doubt which destroys itself in de
stroying every fixed point from which to make an attack upon knowl
edge, "t

Others have gone to the opposite extreme, and main- .
tained that we can have no introspective cognition of our / )

* Compare some remarks in Mill's Logic, bk. i. chap, in §§ 2, 3.
f Logic, § 40. J Psychologic, bk. n. chap. in. §§ 1, 2.

188 PSYCHOLOGY.

own minds at all. A deliverance of Auguste Comte to thia
effect has been so often quoted as to be almost classical ;
and some reference to it seems therefore indispensable
here.

Philosophers, says Comte,* have

" in these latter days imagined themselves able to distinguish, by a
very singular subtlety, two sorts of observation of equal importance,
one external, the other internal, the latter being solely destined for the
study of intellectual phenomena. ... I limit myself to pointing out
/ the principal consideration which proves clearly that this pretended
; direct contemplation of the mind by itself is a pure illusion. . . .
It is in fact evident that, by an invincible neccessity, the human mind
can observe directly all phenomena except its own proper states. For
by whom shall the observation of these be made ? It is conceivable
that a man might observe himself with respect to the passions that
animate him, for the anatomical organs of passion are distinct from
those whose function is observation. Though we have all made such
observations on ourselves, they can never have much scientific value,
and the best mode of knowing the passions will always be that of ob
serving them from without ; for every strong state of passion ... is
necessarily incompatible with the state of observation. But, as for
observing in the same way intellectual phenomena at the time of their
actual presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannot
divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes
him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in
this case, identical, how could observation take place ? This pretended
psychological method is then radically null and void. On the one
hand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from every
external sensation, especially every intellectual work, — for if you were
to busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what would become
of internal observation ?— on the other hand, after having with the
utmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, you must begin
to contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when nothing
there takes place ! Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensions
some day ridiculed upon the stage. The results of so strange a proced
ure harmonize entirely with its principle. For all the two thousand
years during which metaphysicians have thus cultivated psychology,
they are not agreed about one intelligible and established proposition.

* Internal observation ' gives almost as many divergent results as there
are individuals who think they practise it."

Comte hardly could have known anything of the English,
and nothing of the German, empirical psychology. The

* results ' which he had in mind when writing were probably

* Cours de Philosophic Positive, i. 34-8.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 189

scholastic ones, such as principles of internal activity, the
faculties, the ego, the liberum arbitrium indiffer entice, etc.
John Mill, in replying to him,* says :

" It might have occurred to M. Comte that a fact may be studied
through the medium of memory, not at the very moment of our per
ceiving it, but the moment" after: and this is really the mode in which
our best knowledge of our intellectual acts is generally acquired. We
reflect on what we have been doing when the act is past, but when its
impression in the memory is still fresh. Unless in one of these ways,
we could not have acquired the knowledge which nobody denies us to
have, of what passes in our minds. M. Comte would scarcely have
affirmed that we are not aware of our own intellectual operations. We
know of our observings and our reasonings, either at the very time, or
by memory the moment after; in either case, by direct knowledge, and
not (like things done by us in a state of somnambulism) merely by
their results. This simple fact destroys the whole of M. Comte's argu
ment. Whatever we are directly aware of, we can directly observe."

Where now does the truth lie? Our quotation from
Mill is obviously the one which expresses the most of
practical truth about the matter. Even the writers who
insist upon the absolute veracity of our immediate inner
apprehension of a conscious state have to contrast with
this the fallibility of our memory or observation of it, a
moment later. No one has emphasized more sharply than
Brentano himself the difference between the immediate
feltness of a feeling, and its perception by a subsequent re
flective act. But which mode of consciousness of it is that
which the psychologist must depend on ? If to have feel
ings or thoughts in their immediacy were enough, babies
in the cradle would be psychologists, and infallible ones.
But the psychologist must not only have his mental states
in their absolute veritableness, he must report them and
write about them, name them, classify and compare them
and trace their relations to other things. Whilst alive they
are their own property ; it is only post-mortem that they be
come his prey.f And as in the naming, classing, and know-

* Auguste Comte and Positivism, 3d edition (1882), p. 64.

f Wundt says: " The first rule for utilizing inward observation con-
gists in taking, as far as possible, experiences that are accidental, unex
pected, and not intentionally brought about. . . . First it is best as far as
possible to rely on Memory and not on immediate Apprehension. . .

190 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing of things in general we are notoriously fallible, why noi
also here? Comte is quite right in laying stress on the
, fact that a feeling, to be named, judged, or perceived, must
\ be already past. No subjective state, whilst present, is its
own object; its object is always something else. There
are, it is true, cases in which we appear to be naming our
present feeling, and so to be experiencing and observing
the same inner fact at a single stroke, as when we say ' I
feel tired,' ' I am angry,' etc. But these are illusory, and
a little attention unmasks the illusion. The present con
scious state, when I say ' I feel tired,' is not the direct
state of tire ; when I say ' I feel angry,' it is not the direct
state of anger. It is the state of say ing -I-f eel-tired, of
saying-I-f eel-angry, — entirely different matters, so different
that the fatigue and anger apparently included in them are
considerable modifications of the fatigue and anger directly
felt the previous instant. The act of naming them has
momentarily detracted from their force.*

The only sound grounds on which the infallible veracity
of the introspective judgment might be maintained are
empirical. If we had reason to think it has never yet
deceived us, we might continue to trust it. This is the
ground actually maintained by Herr Mohr.

*' The illusions of our senses,1' says this author, " have undermined

our belief in the reality of the outer world; but in the sphere of inner

observation our confidence is intact, for we have never found ourselves

•• «J to be in error about the reality of an act of thought or feeling. We

Second, internal observation is better fitted to grasp clearly conscious
states, especially voluntary mental acts: such inner processes as are ob
scurely conscious and involuntary will almost entirely elude it, because
the effort to observe interferes with them, and because they seldom abide
in memory." (Logik, n. 432.)

* In cases like this, where the state outlasts the act of naming it, exists

before it, and recurs when it is past, we probably run little practical risk

of error when we talk as if the state knew itself. The state of feeling and

the state of naming the feeling are continuous, and the infallibility of

such prompt introspective judgments is probably great. But even here the

certainty of our knowledge ought not to be argued on the a priori ground

; that percipi and esse are in psychology the same. The states are really

' two; the naming state and the named state are apart; 'percipi is esse' is not

the principle tnat applies.

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 191

have never been misled into thinking we were not in doubt or in anger
when these conditions were really states of our consciousness." *

But sound as the reasoning here would be, were the
premises correct, I fear the latter cannot pass. However
it may be with such strong feelings as doubt or anger, ( i /
about weaker feelings, and about the relations to each other !/f
of all feelings, we find ourselves in continual error and
uncertainty so soon as we are called on to name and class,
and not merely to feel. Who can be sure of the exact order
of his feelings when they are excessively rapid ? Who can
be sure, in his sensible perception of a chair, how much
comes from the eye and how much is supplied out of the
previous knowledge of the mind ? Who can compare with
precision the quantities of disparate feelings even where the
feelings are very much alike ? For instance, where an object
is felt now against the back and now against the cheek,
which feeling is most extensive? Who can be sure that
two given feelings are or are not exactly the same ? Who
can tell which is briefer or longer than the other when
both occupy but an instant of time ? Who knows, of many |
actions, for what motive they were done, or if for any motive
at all ? Who can enumerate all the distinct ingredients of
such a complicated feeling as anger ? and who can tell off
hand whether or no a perception of distance be a compound
or a simple state of mind? The whole mind-stuff contro
versy would stop if we could decide conclusively by intro- /
spection that what seem to us elementary feelings are '
really elementary and not compound.

Mr. Sully, in his work on Illusions, has a chapter on
those of Introspection from which we might now quote.
But, since the rest of this volume will be little more than a
collection of illustrations of the difficulty of discovering by
direct introspection exactly what our feelings and their
relations are, we need not anticipate our own future details,
but just state our general conclusion that introspection is
difficult and fallible; and that the difficulty is simply that
of all observation of whatever kind. Something is before

* J. Mohr: Grundlage der Empirischen Psychologic (Leipzig, 1882),
p- 47.

192 PSYCHOLOGY.

us ; we do our best to tell what it is, but in spite of oui
good will we may go astray, and give a description more
applicable to some other sort of thing. The only safeguard
is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the
thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until
at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached.
Such a system, gradually worked out, is the best guarantee
the psychologist can give for the soundness of any partic
ular psychologic observation which he may report. Such a
system we ourselves must strive, as far as may be, to attain.
The English writers on psychology, and the school of
Herbart in Germany, have in the main contented them
selves with such results as the immediate introspection of
single individuals gave, and shown what a body of doctrine
they may make. The works of Locke, Hume, Reid, Hart
ley, Stewart, Brown, the Mills, will always be classics in
this line ; and in Professor Bain's Treatises we have prob
ably the last word of what this method taken mainly by
itself can do — the last monument of the youth of our science,
still unteclmical and generally intelligible, like the Chem
istry of Lavoisier, or Anatomy before the microscope was
used.

The Experimental Method. But psychology is passing
into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may
call a microscopic psychologj^ has arisen in Germany, car
ried on by experimental methods, asking of course every
moment for introspective data, but eliminating their uncer
tainty by operating on a large scale and taking statistical
means. This method taxes patience to the utmost, and
could hardly have arisen in a country whose natives
could be bored. Such Germans as Weber, Fechner,
Vierordt, and Wundt obviously cannot ; and their success
has brought into the field an array of younger experi
mental psychologists, bent on studying the elements of the
mental life, dissecting them out from the gross results in
which they are embedded, and as far as possible reducing
them to quantitative scales. The simple and open method
of attack having done what it can, the method of patience,
starving out, and harassing to death is tried; the Mind

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 103

must submit to a regular siege, in which minute advantages
gained night and day by the forces that hem her in must
sum themselves up at last into her overthrow. There is
little of the grand style about these new prism, pendulum,
and chronograph-philosophers. They mean business, not
chivalry. What generous divination, and that superiority
in virtue which was thought by Cicero to give a man the
best insight into nature, have failed to do, their spying
and scraping, their deadly tenacity and almost diabolic
cunning, will doubtless some day bring about,

No general description of the methods of experimental
psychology would be instructive to one unfamiliar with the
instances of their application, so we will waste no words
upon the attempt. The principal fields of experimentation
BO far have been : 1) the connection of conscious states
with their physical conditions, including the whole of brain-
physiology, and the recent minutely cultivated physiology
of the sense-organs, together with what is technically known
as 'psycho-physics,' or the laws of ^correlation between
sensations aijd the outward stimuli by which they are
aroused ; 2) the analysis of space-perceptionlnto its sensa
tional elements ; 3) the measurement of the duration of the
simplest mental processes ; 4) that of the accuracy of re
production in the memory of sensible experiences and of
intervals of space and time; 5) that of the manner in
which simple mental states influence each other, call each
other up, or inhibit each other's reproduction ; 6) that of
the number of facts which consciousness can simultaneously
discern ; finally, 7) that of the elementary laws of obli-
vescence and retention. It must be said that in some of
these fields the results have as yet borne little theoretic
fruit commensurate with the great labor expended in their
acquisition. But facts are facts, and if we only get enough
of them they are sure to combine. New ground will from
year to year be broken, and theoretic results will grow.
Meanwhile the experimental method has quite changed the
face of the science so far as the latter is a record of mere
work done.

The comparative method, finally, supplements the intro

194 PSYCHOLOGY.

spective and experimental methods. This method pre
supposes a normal psychology of introspection to be estab
lished in its main features. But where the origin of these
features, or their dependence upon one another, is in ques
tion, it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenom
enon considered through all its possible variations of type
and combination. So it has come to pass that instincts of
; animals are ransacked to throw light on our own ; and that
^ the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages,
infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and
eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special
theory about some part of our own mental life. The history
of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages,
as types of mental product, are pressed into the same ser
vice. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of
circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to those
supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it
will be well for us in the next generation if such cir
culars be not ranked among the common pests of life.
Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge. There
are great sources of error in the comparative method-^
The interpretation of the ' psychoses ' of animals, savages,
and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the per
sonal equation of the investigator has things very much
its own way. A savage will be reported to have no
moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the ob
server unduly. A child will be assumed without self-con
sciousness because he talks of himself in the third person,
etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Com
parative observations, to be definite, must usually be made
to test some pre-existing hypothesis ; and the only thing
/ j\ then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be
7 as candid as you can.

THE SOURCES OF ERROR IN PSYCHOLOGY.

The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence 0}
Speech. Language was originally made by men who were
fSlf^psychologists, and most men to-day employ almost
exclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The car
dinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope,

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 195

and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual
activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with
the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow,
pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order
which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words.
The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud, red,
blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used in
both an objective and a subjective sense. They stand for
outer qualities and for the feelings which these arouse. But
the objective sense is the original sense ; and still to-day
we have to describe a large number of sensations by the
name of the object from which they have most frequently
been got. An orange color, an odor of violets, a cheesy
taste, a thunderous sound, a fiery smart, etc., will recall
what I mean. This absence of a special vocabulary for sub
jective facts hinders the study of all but the very coarsest
of them. Empiricist writers are very fond of emphasizing
one great set of delusions which language inflicts on the
mind. Whenever we have made a word, they say, to denote
a certain group of phenomena, we are prone to suppose a
substantive entity existing beyond the phenomena, of which
the word shall be the name. But the lack of a word quite
as often leads to the directly opposite error. We are then
prone to suppose that no entity can be there ; and so we
come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be
patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly
recognized in speech.* It is hard to focus OUT attention on \
J;he nameless, and so there results a certain vacuousness in )
the descriptive parts of most psychologies.

But a worse defect than vacuousness comes from the
dependence of psychology on common speech. Naming
our thought by its own objects, we almost all of us assume
that as the objects are, so the thought must be. The
thought of several distinct things can only consist of several
distinct bits of thought, or ' ideas ; ' that of an abstract or
universal object can only be an abstract or universal, idea

* In English we have not even the generic distinction between the-
thiug-thought-of and the-thought-thinking-it, which in German is expressed
by the opposition between (jedachtes and Gedanke, in Latiu by that between
WQitfitum and cooitatda

196 PSYCHOLOGY.

As each object may come and go, be forgotten and then
thought of again, it is held that the thought of it has a pre
cisely similar independence, self-identity, and mobility.
The thought of the object's recurrent identity is regarded
as the identity of its recurrent thought ; and the perceptions
of multiplicity, of coexistence, of succession, are severally
conceived to be brought about only through a multiplic
ity, a coexistence, a succession, of perceptions. The con
tinuous flow of the mental stream is sacrificed, and in its
place an atomism, a brickbat plan of construction, is
preached, for the existence of which no good introspective
grounds can be brought forward, and out of which pres
ently grow all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, the
heritage of woe of students of the mind.

These words are meant to impeach the entire English
psychology derived from Locke and Hume, and the entire
German psychology derived from Herbart, so far as they
both treat 'ideas' as separate subjective entities that come
and go. Examples will soon make the matter clearer.
Meanwhile our psychologic insight is vitiated by still other
snares.

'The Psychologist's Fallacy.' The great snare of the psy
chologist is the confusion of his own standpoint with that of the
•mental fact about which he is making his report. I shall
hereafter call this the 'psychologist's fallacy' par excellence.
For some of the mischief, here too, language is to blame.
The psychologist, as we remarked above (p. 183), stands out
side of the mental state he speaks of. Both itself and it»
object are objects for him. Now when it is a cognitive state
(percept, thought, concept, etc.), he ordinarily has no other
way of naming it than as the thought, percept, etc., of that
object. He himself, meanwhile, knowing the self-same
object in his way, gets easily led to suppose that the
thought, which is of it, knows it in the same way in wrhich
he knows it, although this is often very far from being the
case.* The most fictitious puzzles have been introduced
into our science by this means. The so-called question of
presentative or representative perception, of whether an

* Compare B. P. Bowne's Metaphysics (1882), p. 408,

THE METHODS AND SNARES OF PSYCHOLOGY. 197

object is present to the thought that thinks it by a coun
terfeit image of itself, or directly and without any interven*
ing image at all ; the question of nominalism and concep-
tualism, of the shape in which things are present when only
a general notion of them is before the mind ; are compara
tively easy questions when once the psychologist's fallacy
is eliminated from their treatment, — as we shall ere long
see (in Chapter XII).

Another variety of the psychologist's fallacy is the as
sumption that the mental state studied must be conscious of it
self as the psychologist is conscious of it. The mental state is
aware of itself only from within ; it grasps what we call its
own content, and nothing more. The psychologist, on the
contrary, is aware of it from without, and knows its relations
with all sorts of other things. What the thought sees is '
only its own object; what the psychologist sees is the j
thought's object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly all
the rest of the world. We must be very careful therefore,
in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist's point
of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are
only there for ours. We must avoid substituting what we
know the consciousness is, for what it is a consciousness of,
and counting its outward, and so to speak physical, relations
with other facts of the world, in among the objects of which
we set it down as aware. Crude as such a confusion of
standpoints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is never
theless a snare into which no psychologist has kept himself
at all times from falling, and which forms almost the entire
stock-in-trade of certain schools. We cannot be too watch
ful against its subtly corrupting influence.

Summary. To sum up the chapter, Psychology assumes
that thoughts successively occur, and that they know objects
in a world which the psychologist also knows. These thoughts
are the subjective data of which he treats, and their relations to
their objects, to the brain, and to the rest of the ivorld constitute
the subject-matter of psychologic science. Its methods are
introspection, experimentation, and comparison. But intro
spection is no sure guide to truths about our mental states ;
and in particular the poverty of the psychological vocabu.

198 PSYCHOLOGY.

lary leads us to drop out certain states from our consid
eration, and to treat others as if they knew themselves and
their objects as the psychologist knows both, which is a
disastrous fallacy in the science.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS.

SINCE, for psychology, a mind is an object in a world of
other objects, its relation to those other objects must next
be surveyed. First of all, to its

TIME-RELATIONS.

Minds, as we know them, are temporary existences.
Whether my mind had a being prior to the birth of my body,
whether it shall have one after the latter's decease, are
questions to be decided by my general philosophy or the
ology rather than by what we call ' scientific facts ' — I leave
out the facts of so-called spiritualism, as being still in dis
pute. Psychology, as a natural science, confines itself to
the present life, in which every mind appears yoked to a
body through which its manifestations appear. In the
present world, then, minds precede, succeed, and coexist
with each other in the common receptacle of time, and of
their collective relations to the latter nothing more can be
said. The life of the individual consciousness in time seems,
however, to be an interrupted one, so that the question :

Are we ever wholly unconscious ?

becomes one which must be discussed. Sleep, fainting,
coma, epilepsy, and other ' unconscious ' conditions are apt
to break in upon and occupy large durations of what we
nevertheless consider the mental history of a single man.
And, the fact of interruption being admitted, is it not
possible that it may exist where we do not suspect it, and
even perhaps in an incessant and fine-grained form ?

This might happen, and yet the subject himself never
know it. We often take ether and have operations per
formed without a suspicion that our consciousness has suf

199

200 PSYCHOLOGY.

fered a breach. The two ends join each other smoothly
over the gap ; and only the sight of our wound assures us
that we must have been living through a time which for
our immediate consciousness was non-existent. Even in
sleep this sometimes happens : We think we have had no
nap, and it takes the clock to assure us that we are wrong.*
We thus may live through a real outward time, a time
known by the psychologist who studies us, and yet not
feel the time, or infer it from any inward sign. The ques
tion is, how often does this happen ? Is consciousness
really discontinuous, incessantly interrupted and recom
mencing (from the psychologist's point of view) ? and does
it only seem continuous to itself by an illusion analogous
to that of the zoetrope ? Or is it at most times as continu
ous outwardly as it inwardly seems ?

It must be confessed that we can give no rigorous
answer to this question. Cartesians, who hold that the
essence of the soul is to think, can of course solve it
a priori, and explain the appearance of thoughtless inter
vals either by lapses in our ordinary memory, or by the
sinking of consciousness to a minimal state, in which per
haps all that it feels is a bare existence which leaves no
particulars behind to be recalled. If, however, one have
no doctrine about the soul or its essence, one is free to take
the appearances for what they seem to be, and to admit
that the mind, as well as the body, may go to sleep.

Locke was the first prominent champion of this latter
view, and the pages in which he attacks the Cartesian belief
are as spirited as any in his Essay. " Every drowsy nod
shakes their doctrine who teach that their soul is always
thinking." He will not believe that men so easily forget.
M. Jouffroy and Sir W. Hamilton, attacking the question in
the same empirical way, are led to an opposite conclusion.
Their reasons, briefly stated, are these :

* Messrs. Payton Spence (Journal of Spec. Phil., x. 338, xiv. 286)
and M. M. Garver (Amer. Jour, of Science, 3d series, xx. 189) argue, the
one from speculative, the other from experimental grounds, that, the physi
cal condition of consciousness being neural vibration, the consciousness
must itself be incessantly interrupted by unconsciousness— about fifty times
a second, according to Garver.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 201

Iii somnambulism, natural or induced, there is often a
great display of intellectual activity, followed by complete
oblivion of all that has passed.*

On being suddenly awakened from a sleep, however pro
found, we always catch ourselves in the middle of a dream.
Common dreams are often remembered for a few minutes
after waking, and then irretrievably lost.

Frequently, when awake and absent-minded, we are
visited by thoughts and images which the next instant we
cannot recall.

Our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake,
proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we never
theless feel. Similarly in sleep, we grow inured, and sleep
soundly in presence of sensations of sound, cold, contact,
etc., which at first prevented our complete repose. We have
learned to neglect them whilst asleep as we should whilst
awake. The mere sense-impressions are the same when the
sleep is deep as when it is light ; the difference must lie in
a judgment on the part of the apparently slumbering mind
that they are not worth noticing.

This discrimination is equally shown by nurses of the
sick and mothers of infants, who will sleep through much
noise of an irrelevant sort, but waken at the slightest stir
ring of the patient or the babe. This last fact shows the
sense-organ to be pervious for sounds.

Many people have a remarkable faculty of registering
when asleep the flight of time. They will habitually wake
up at the same minute day after day, or will wake punctu
ally at an unusual hour determined upon overnight. How
can this knowledge of the hour (more accurate often than
anything the waking consciousness shows) be possible
without mental activity during the interval ?

Such are what we may call the classical reasons for ad
mitting that the mind is active even when the person after
wards ignores the fact.f Of late years, or rather, one may

* That the appearance of meutal activity here is real can be proved by
suggesting to the ' hypnotized ' somnambulist that he shall remember when
he awakes. He will then often do so.

f For more details, cf. Malebranche, Rech. de la Verite, bk. in. chap,
i; J. Locke, Essay cone. H. U., book 11. ch. i; C. Wolf, Psychol.

202 PSYCHOLOGY.

say, of late months, they have been reinforced by a lot of
curious observations made on hysterical and hypnotic
subjects, which prove the existence of a highly developed
consciousness in places where it has hitherto not been sus
pected at all. These observations throw such a novel light
upon human nature that I must give them in some detail.
That at least four different and in a certain sense rival ob
servers should agree in the same conclusion justifies us in
accepting the conclusion as true.

' Unconsciousness ' in Hysterics.

One of the most constant symptoms in persons suffer
ing from hysteric disease in its extreme forms consists in
alterations of the natural sensibility of various parts and
organs of the body. Usually the alteration is in the direc
tion of defect, or anaesthesia. One or both eyes are blind,
or color-blind, or there is hemianopsia (blindness to one
half the field of view), or the field is contracted. Hearing,
taste, smell may similarly disappear, in part or in totality.
Still more striking are the cutaneous anaesthesias. The old
witch-finders looking for the ' devil's seals ' learned well
the existence of those insensible patches on the skin of
their victims, to which the minute physical examinations
of recent medicine have but recently attracted attention
again. They may be scattered anywhere, but are very
apt to affect one side of the body. Not infrequently they
affect an entire lateral half, from head to foot; and the
insensible skin of, say, the left side will then be found
separated from the naturally sensitive skin of the right by a
perfectly sharp line of demarcation down the middle of the
front and back. Sometimes, most remarkable of all, the
entire skin, hands, feet, face, everything, and the mucous
membranes, muscles and joints so far as they can be ex-

rationalis, § 59; Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaph., lecture xvn;
J. Bascom, Science of Mind, § 12; Th. Jouffroy, Melanges Philos., 'du
Sommeil'; H. Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiol., p. 80; B. Brodie,
Psychol, Researches, p. 147; E. M. Chesley, Journ. of Spec. Phil., vol. xi'
p. 72; Th. Ribot, Maladies de la Personnalite, pp. 8-10; H. Lotze, Meta
physics, § 533.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 203

plored, become completely insensible without the other vital
functions becoming gravely disturbed.

These hysterical anaesthesias can be made to disappear
more or less completely by various odd processes. It has
been recently found that magnets, plates of metal, or the
electrodes of a battery, placed against the skin, have this
peculiar power. And when one side is relieved in this way.
the anaesthesia is often found to have transferred itself to
the opposite side, which until then was well. Whether these
strange effects of magnets and metals be due to their direct
physiological action, or to a prior effect on the patient's
mind (' expectant attention' or * suggestion') is still a
mooted question. A still better awakener of sensibility is
the hypnotic trance, into which many of these patients can
be very easily placed, and in which their lost sensibility not
infrequently becomes entirely restored. Such returns of
sensibility succeed the times of insensibility and alternate
with them. But Messrs. Pierre Janet* and A. Biuet t have
shown that during the times of anaesthesia, and coexisting
with it, sensibility to the anesthetic parts is also there, in the
form of a secondary consciousness entirely cut off from the
primary or normal one, but susceptible of being tapped and
made to testify to its existence in various odd ways.

Chief amongst these is what M. Janet calls ' the method
of distraction.' These hysterics are apt to possess a very
narrow field of attention, and to be unable to think of more
than one thing at a time. When talking with any person
they forget everything else. " When Lucie talked directly
with any one," saysM. Janet, "she ceased to be able to hear
any other person. You may stand behind her, call her by
name, shout abuse into her ears, without making her turn
round ; or place yourself before her, show her objects,
touch her, etc., without attracting her notice. When finally
she becomes aware of you, she thinks you have just come
into the room again, and greets you accordingly. This
singular forgetfulness makes her liable to tell all her secrete
aloud, unrestrained by the presence of unsuitable auditors."

* L'Automatisme Psychologique, Paris, 1889, passim.
f See his articles in the Chicago Open Court, for July, August and
November, 1889. Also in the Revue Philosophique for 1889 and '90.

204 PSYCHOLOGY.

Now M. Janet found in several subjects like this that if he
came up behind them whilst they were plunged in conversa
tion with a third party, and addressed them in a whisper, tell
ing them to raise their hand or perform other simple acts,
they would obey the order given, although their talk
ing intelligence was quite unconscious of receiving it. Lead
ing them from one thing to another, he made them reply by
signs to his whispered questions, and finally made them
answer in writing, if a pencil were placed in their hand.
The primary consciousness meanwhile went on with the
conversation, entirely unaware of these performances on the
hand's part. The consciousness which presided over these
latter appeared in its turn to be quite as little disturbed by
the upper consciousness's concerns. This proof by 'auto
matic ' ivriting, of a secondary consciousness's existence, is
the most cogent and striking one ; but a crowd of other facts
prove the same thing. If I run through them rapidly, the
reader will probably be convinced.

The apparently anaesthetic hand of these subjects, for
one thing, will often adapt itself discriminatingly to what
ever object may be put into it. With a pencil it will make
writing movements ; into a pair of scissors it will put its fin
gers and will open and shut them, etc., etc. The primary con
sciousness, so to call it, is meanwhile unable to say whether
or no anything is in the hand, if the latter be hidden from
sight. " I put a pair of eyeglasses into Leonie's anaesthetic
hand, this hand opens it and raises it towards the nose, but
half way thither it enters the field of vision of Leonie, who
sees it and stops stupefied : ' Why,' says she, ' I have an eye
glass in my left hand !'" M. Binet found a very curious sort
of connection between the apparently anaesthetic skin and
the mind in some Salpetriere-subjects. Things placed in
the hand were not felt, but thought of (apparently in visual
terms) and in no wise referred by the subject to their start
ing point in the hand's sensation. A key, a knife, placed in
the hand occasioned ideas of a key or a knife, but the hand
felt nothing. Similarly the subject thought of the number
3, 6, etc., if the hand or finger was bent three or six times
by the operator, or if he stroked it three, six, etc., times.

In certain individuals there was found a still odder

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS, 205

phenomenon, which reminds one of that curious idiosyncrasy
of ' colored hearing ' of which a few cases have been lately
described with great care by foreign writers. These indi
viduals, namely, saw the impression received by the hand,
but could not feel it ; and the thing seen appeared by no
means associated with the hand, but more like an indepen
dent vision, which usually interested and surprised the
patient. Her hand being hidden by a screen, she was
ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual
image which might project itself thereon. Numbers would
then come, corresponding to the number of times the in
sensible member was raised, touched, etc. Colored lines
and figures would come, corresponding to similar ones
traced on the palm ; the hand itself or its fingers would
come when manipulated ; and finally objects placed in it
would come ; but on the hand itself nothing would ever be
felt. Of course simulation would not be hard here; but
M. Binet disbelieves this (usually very shallow) explanation
to be a probable one in cases in question.*

The usual way in which doctors measure the delicacy
of our touch is by the compass-points. Two points are
normally felt as one whenever they are too close together
for discrimination ; but what is ' too close ' on one part of
the skin may seem very far apart on another. In the
middle of the back or on the thigh, less than 3 inches may
be too close ; on the finger-tip a tenth of an inch is far
enough apart. Now, as tested in this way, with the appeal
made to the primary consciousness, which talks through
the mouth and seems to hold the field alone, a certain per
son's skin may be entirely anaesthetic and not feel the com
pass-points at all ; and yet this same skin will prove to have
a perfectly normal sensibility if the appeal be made to that
other secondary or sub-consciousness, which expresses
itself automatically by writing or by movements of the hand.
M. Binet, M. Pierre Janet, and M. Jules Janet have all found
this. The subject, whenever touched, wonld signify 'one

* This whole phenomenon shows how an idea which remains itself below
the threshold of a certain conscious self may occasion associative effects
therein. The skin-seusations uufelt by the patient's primary consciousness
awaken nevertheless their usual visual associates therein.

206 PSYCHOLOGY.

point ' or ' two points/ as accurately as if she were a nor<
mal person. She would signify it only by these movements ;
and of the movements themselves her primary self would
be as unconscious as of the facts they signified, for what the
submerged consciousness makes the hand do automatically
is unknown to the consciousness which uses the mouth.

Messrs. Bernheim and Pitres have also proved, by ob
servations too complicated to be given in this spot,
that the hysterical blindness is no real blindness at all.
The eye of an hysteric which is totally blind when the
other or seeing eye is shut, will do its share of vision per
fectly well when both eyes are open together. But even
where both eyes are semi-blind from hysterical disease,
the method of automatic writing proves that their percep
tions exist, only cut off from communication with the upper
consciousness. M. Binet has found the hand of his patients
unconsciously writing down words which their eyes were
vainly endeavoring to ' see,' i.e., to bring to the upper con
sciousness. Their submerged consciousness was of course
seeing them, or the hand could not have written as it did.
Colors are similarly perceived by the sub-conscious self,
which the hysterically color-blind eyes cannot bring to the
normal consciousness. Pricks, burns, and pinches on the
anaesthetic skin, all unnoticed by the upper self, are recol
lected to have been suffered, and complained of, as soon
as the under self gets a chance to express itself by the
passage of the subject into hypnotic trance.

It must be admitted, therefore, that in certain persons,
at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into
parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other, and
share the objects of knowledge between them. More re
markable still, they are complementary. Give an object
to one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact you remove
it from the other or others. Barring a certain common
fund of information, like the command of language, etc.,
what the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of,
and vice versa. M. Janet has proved this beautifully in his
subject Lucie. The following experiment will serve as the
type of the rest : In her trance he covered her lap with
cards, each bearing a number. He then told her that OD

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 207

waking she should not see any card whose number was a
multiple of three. This is the ordinary so-called ' post-
hypnotic suggestion/ now well known, and for which Lucie
was a well-adapted subject. Accordingly, when she was
awakened and asked about the papers on her lap, she
counted and said she saw those only whose number was
not a multiple of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind.
But the hand, when the sub-conscious self was interrogated
by the usual method of engrossing the upper self in another
conversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie's lap were
those numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pick
up all the cards which were there, picked up these and let
the others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain things
was suggested to the sub-conscious Lucie, the normal
Lucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. " What
is the matter? I can't see!" the normal personage sud
denly cried out in the midst of her conversation, when
M. Janet whispered to the secondary personage to make
use of her eyes. The anaesthesias, paralyses, contractions
and other irregularities from which hysterics suffer seem
then to be clue to the fact that their secondary personage
has enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a func
tion which the latter ought to have retained. The curative
indication is evident : get at the secondary personage, by
Jiypnotization or in whatever other way, and make her give
up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part
may be. The normal self thereupon regains possession, sees,
feels, or is able to move again. In this way M. Jules Janet
easily cured the well-known subject of the Salpetriere, Wit.,
of all sorts of afflictions which, until he discovered the
secret of her deeper trance, it had been difficult to subdue.
" Cessez cette mauvaise plaisanterie," he said to the sec
ondary self — and the latter obeyed. The way in which the
various personages share the stock of possible sensations
between them seems to be amusingly illustrated in this
young woman. When awake, her skin is insensible every
where except on a zone about the arm where she habitually
wears a gold bracelet. This zone has feeling ; but in the
deepest trance, when all the rest of her body feels, this par
ticular zone becomes absolutely anaesthetic.

208 PSYCHOLOGY.

Sometimes the mutual ignorance of the selves leads to
incidents which are strange enough. The acts and move
ments performed by the sub- conscious self are withdrawn
from the conscious one, and the subject will do all sorts of
incongruous things of which he remains quite unaware.
" I order Lucie [by the method of distraction] to make a
pied de nez, and her hands go forthwith to the end of her
nose. Asked what she is doing, she replies that she is
doing nothing, and continues for a long time talking, with
no apparent suspicion that her fingers are moving in front
of her nose. I make her walk about the room ; she con
tinues to speak and believes herself sitting down."

M. Janet observed similar acts in a man in alcoholic
delirium. Whilst the doctor was questioning him, M. J.
made him by whispered suggestion walk, sit, kneel, and even
lie down on his face on the floor, he all the while believing
himself to be standing beside his bed. Such bizarreries
sound incredible, until one has seen their like. Long ago,
without understanding it, I myself saw a small example of
the way in which a person's knowledge may be shared by
the two selves. A young woman who had been writing
automatically was sitting with a pencil in her hand, trying to
recall at my request the name of a gentleman whom she had
once seen. She could only recollect the first syllable. Her
hand meanwhile, without her knowledge, wrote down the
last two syllables. In a perfectly healthy young man who
can write with the planchette, I lately found the hand to
be entirely anaesthetic during the writing act ; I could prick
it severely without the Subject knowing the fact. The writ
ing on the planchette, however, accused me in strong terms
of hurting the hand. Pricks on the other (non-writing)
hand, meanwhile, which awakened strong protest from the
young man's vocal organs, were denied to exist by the self
which made the planchette go."x"

We get exactly similar results in the so-called post-hyp
notic suggestion. It is a familiar fact that certain sub
jects, when told during a trance to perform an act or to

* See Proceedings of American Soc. for Psych. Research, vol. I. p.
54S,

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 209

experience an hallucination after waking, will when the time
comes, obey the command. How is the command regis
tered? How is its performance so accurately timed?
These problems were long a mystery, for the primary per
sonality remembers nothing of the trance or the suggestion,
and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yielding
to the unaccountable impulse which possesses the man so
suddenly and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurney
was the first to discover, by means of automatic writing, that
the secondary self is awake, keeping its attention con
stantly fixed on the command and watching for the signal
of its execution. Certain trance-subjects who were also
automatic writers, when roused from trance and put to the
planchette, — not knowing then what they wrote, and having
their upper attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talk
ing, or solving problems in mental arithmetic, — would in
scribe the orders which they had received, together with
notes relative to the time elapsed and the time yet to run
before the execution. * It is therefore to no ' automatism '
in the mechanical sense that such acts are due : a self pre
sides over them, a split-off, limited and buried, but yet a
fully conscious, self. More than this, the buried self often
comes to the surface and drives out the other self whilst
the acts are performing. In other words, the subject
lapses into trance again when the moment arrives for exe
cution, and has no subsequent recollection of the act which
he has done. Gurney and Beaunis established this fact,
which has since been verified on a large scale ; and Gurney
also showed that the patient became suggestible again during
the brief time of the performance. M. Janet's observa
tions, in their turn, well illustrate the phenomenon.

" I tell I/ucie to keep her arms raised after she shall have
awakened. Hardly is she in the normal state, when up go her arms
above her head, but she pays no attention to them. She goes, comes,
converses, holding her arms high in the air. If asked what her arms
are doing, she is surprised at such a question, and says very sincerely :
'My hands are doing nothing; they are just like yours.' ... I com-

* Proceedings of the (London) Soc. for Psych. Research, Hay, 1887, p.
268 ff.

210 PSYCHOLOGY.

mand her to weep, and when awake she really sobs, but continues ir
the rnidst of her tears to talk of very gay matters. The sobbing over,
there remained no trace of this grief, which seemed to have been quite
sub-conscious."

The primary self often has to invent an hallucination by
which to mask and hide from its own view the deeds which
the other self is enacting. Leonie 3 * writes real letters
whilst Leonie 1 believes that she is knitting ; or Lucie
really comes to the doctor's office, whilst Lucie 1 believes
herself to be at home. This is a sort of delirium. The
alphabet, or the series of numbers, when handed over to
the attention of the secondary personage may for the
time be lost to the normal self. Whilst the hand writes
the alphabet, obediently to command, the ' subject/ to
her great stupefaction, finds herself unable to recall it, etc.
Few things are more curious than these relations of mutual
exclusion, of which all gradations exist between the several
partial consciousnesses.

How far this splitting up of the mind into separate con
sciousnesses may exist in each one of us is a problem. M.
Janet holds that it is only possible where there is abnormal
weakness, and consequently a defect of unifying or co-or
dinating power. An hysterical woman abandons part of her
consciousness because she is too weak nervously to hold
it together. The abandoned part, meanwhile may solidify
into a secondary or sub-conscious self. In a perfectly sound
subject, on the other hand, what is dropped out of mind at
one moment keeps coming back at the next. The whole
fund of experiences and knowledges remains integrated, and
no split-off portions of it can get organized stably enough
to form subordinate selves. The stability, monotony, and
stupidity of these latter is often very striking. The post-
hypnotic sub-consciousness seems to think of nothing but
the order which it last received; the cataleptic sub-con
sciousness, of nothing but the last position imprinted on the
limb. M. Janet could cause definitely circumscribed red
dening and tumefaction of the skin on two of his subjects,

* M, Janet designates by numbers the different personalities which the
subject may display.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 211

by suggesting to them in hypnotism the hallucination of a
mustard-poultice of any special shape. "J'ai tout le
temps pense a votre sinapisme," says the subject, when
put back into trance after the suggestion has taken effect.
A man N., . . . whom M. Janet operated on at long in
tervals, was betweenwhiles tampered with by another
operator, and when put to sleep again by M. Janet, said he
was ' too far away to receive orders, being in Algiers.'
The other operator, having suggested that hallucination,
had forgotten to remove it before waking the subject from
his trance, and the poor passive trance-personality had
stuck for weeks in the stagnant dream. Leonie's sub-con
scious performances having been illustrated to a caller, by
a ' pied de nez ' executed with her left hand in the course
of conversation, when, a year later, she meets him again,
up goes the same hand to her nose again, without Leonie's
normal self suspecting the fact.

All these facts, taken together, form unquestionably the
beginning of an inquiry which is destined to throw a new
light into the very abysses of our nature. It is for that
reason that I have cited them at such length in this early
chapter of the book. They prove one thing conclusively,
namely, that we must never take a person's testimony, hoiv-
ever sincere, that he has felt nothing, as proof positive that
no feeling has been there. It may have been there as part of
the consciousness of a ' secondary personage,' of whose ex
periences the primary one whom we are consulting can
naturally give no account. In hypnotic subjects (as we
shall see in a later chapter) just as it is the easiest thing in
the world to paralyze a movement or member by simple
suggestion, so it is easy to produce what is called a system
atized anaesthesia by word of command. A systematized
anaesthesia means an insensibility, not to any one element
of things, but to some one concrete thing or class of things.
The subject is made blind or deaf to a certain person in the
room and to no one else, and thereupon denies that that per
son is present, or has spoken, etc. M. P. Janet's Lucie, blind
Co some of the numbered cards in her lap (p. 207 above), is
a case in point. Now when the object is simple, like a red

212 PSYCHOLOGY.

wafer or a black cross, the subject, although he denies that
he sees it when he looks straight at it, nevertheless gets a
' negative after-image ' of it when he looks away again,
showing that the optical, impression of it has been received.
Moreover reflection shows that such a subject must dis
tinguish the object from others like it in order to be blind to
it. Make him blind to one person in the room, set all
the persons in a row, and tell him to count them. He will
count all but that one. But how can he tell which one not
to count without recognizing who he is ? In like manner,
make a stroke on paper or blackboard, and tell him it is
not there, and he will see nothing but the clean paper or
board. Next (he not looking) surround the original stroke
with other strokes exactly like it, and ask him what he
sees. He will point out one by one all the new strokes, and
omit the original one every time, no matter how numerous
the new strokes may be, or in what order they are
arranged. Similarly, if the original single stroke to which
he is blind be doubled by a prism of some sixteen degrees
placed before one of his eyes (both being kept open), he
will say that he now sees one stroke, and point in the direc
tion in which the image seen through the prism lies, ignor
ing still the original stroke.

Obviously, then, he is not blind to the kind of stroke in
the least. He is blind only to one individual stroke of that
kind in a particular position on the board or paper — that
is to a particular complex object ; and, paradoxical as it
may seem to say so, he must distinguish it with great ac
curacy from others like it, in order to remain blind to it
when the others are brought near. He discriminates it, as
a preliminary to not seeing it at all.

Again, when by a prism before one eye a previously in
visible line has been made visible to that eye, and the other
eye is thereupon closed or screened, its closure makes no
difference ; the line still remains visible. But if then the
prism be removed, the line will disappear even to the eye
which a moment ago saw it, and both eyes will revert to
their original blind state.

We have, then, to deal in these cases neither with a blind
ness of the eye itself, nor with a mere failure to notice, but

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS 213

with something much more complex ; namely, an active
counting out and positive exclusion of certain objects. It
is as when one * cuts ' an acquaintance, ' ignores ' a claim,
or * refuses to be influenced ' by a consideration. But the
perceptive activity which works to this result is discon
nected from the consciousness which is personal, so to
speak, to the subject, and makes of the object concerning
which the suggestion is made, its own private possession
and prey.*

The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stir
rings of her babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her au
ditory sensibility systematically awake. ^Relatively to that,
the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized anaesthesia.
That department, split off and disconnected from the sleep
ing part, can none the less wake the latter up in case of
need. So that on the whole the quarrel between Des
cartes and Locke as to whether the mind ever sleeps is less
near to solution than ever. On a priori speculative grounds
Locke's view that thought and feeling may at times wholly
disappear seems the more plausible. As glands cease to
secrete and muscles to contract, so the brain should some
times cease to carry currents, and with this minimum of its
activity might well coexist a minimum of consciousness.
On the other hand, we see how deceptive are appearances,
and are forced to admit that a part of consciousness may
sever its connections with other parts and yet continue to be.
On the whole it is best to abstain from a conclusion. The
science of the near future will doubtless answer this ques
tion more wisely than we can now.

* How to conceive of this state of mind is not easy. It would be much
simpler to understand the process, if adding new strokes made the first one
visible. There would then be two different objects apperceived as totals,
— paper with one stroke, paper with many strokes ; and, blind to the for
mer, he would see all that was in the latter, because he would have apper
ceived it as a different total in the first instance.

A process of this sort occurs sometimes (not always) when the new
strokes, instead of being mere repetitions of the original one, are lines
which combine with it into a total object, say a human face. The sub
ject of the trance then may regain his sight of the line to which he had
previously been blind, by seeing it as part of the face.

214 PSYCHOLOGY.

Let us turn now to consider the

EOLATIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO SPACE.

This is the problem known in the history of philoso
phy as the question of the seat of the soul. It has given
rise to much literature, but we must ourselves treat it very
briefly. Everything depends on what we conceive the soul
to be, an extended or an inextended entity. If the former,
it may occupy a seat. If the latter, it may not ; though it
has been thought that even then it might still have a posi
tion. Much hair-splitting has arisen about the possibility
of an inextended thing nevertheless being present through
out a certain amount of extension. We must distinguish
the kinds of presence. In some manner our consciousness
is ' present ' to everything with which it is in relation. I am
cognitively present to Orion whenever I perceive that con
stellation, but I am not dynamically present there, I work
no effects. To my brain, however, I am dynamically present,
inasmuch as my thoughts and feelings seem to react upon
the processes thereof. If, then, by the seat of the mind is
meant nothing more than the locality with which it stands
in immediate dynamic relations, we are certain to be
right in saying that its seat is somewhere in the cortex of
the brain. Descartes, as is well known, thought that the
inextended soul was immediately present to the pineal
gland. Others, as Lotze in his earlier days, and W. Volk-
mann, think its position must be at some point of the struc
tureless matrix of the anatomical brain-elements, at which
point they suppose that all nerve-currents may cross and
combine. The scholastic doctrine is that the soul is to
tally present, both in the whole and in each and every part
of the body. This mode of presence is said to be due to
the soul's inextended nature and to its simplicity. Two ex
tended entities could only correspond in space with one
another, part to part, — but not so does the soul, which has
no parts, correspond with the body. Sir Wm. Hamilton
and Professor Bowen defend something like this view. I.
H. Fichte, Ulrici, and, among American philosophers, Mr,
J. E. Walter,* maintain the soul to be a space -filling prin-

* Perception of Space and Matter, 1879, part n. chap. 3

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 215

ciple. Ficlite calls it the inner body, Ulrici likens it to a
fluid of non-molecular composition. These theories remind
us of the ' theosophic ' doctrines of the present day, and
carry us back to times when the soul as vehicle of con
sciousness was not discriminated, as it now is, from the
vital principle presiding over the formation of the body.
Plato gave head, breast, and abdomen to the immortal rea
son, the courage, and the appetites, as their seats respec
tively. Aristotle argues that the heart is the sole seat.
Elsewhere we find the blood, the brain, the lungs, the liver
the kidneys even, in turn assigned as seat of the whole or
part of the soul.*

The truth is that if the thinking principle is extended we
neither know its form nor its seat ; whilst if unextended, it
is absurd to speak of its having any space-relations at all.
Space-relations we shall see hereafter to be sensible things.
The only objects that can have mutual relations of position
are objects that are perceived coexisting in the same felt
space. A thing not perceived at all, such as the inextended
soul must be, cannot coexist with any perceived objects in
this way. No lines can be felt stretching from it to the
other objects. It can form no terminus to any space-inter
val. It can therefore in no intelligible sense enjoy position.
Its relations cannot be spatial, but must be exclusively
cognitive or dynamic, as we have seen. So far as they are
dynamic, to talk of the soul being ' present ' is only a figure
of speech. Hamilton's doctrine that the soul is present to
the whole body is at any rate false : for cognitively its pres
ence extends far beyond the body, and dynamically it does
not extend beyond the brain, t

* For a very good condensed history of the various opinions, see W.
Volkmann von Volkmar, Lehrbuch d. Psychologic, § 16, Anm. Complete
references to Sir W. Hamilton are given in J. E. Walter, Perception of
Space and Matter, pp. 65-6.

f Most contemporary writers ignore the question of the soul's seat.
Lotze is the only one who seems to have been much concerned about it,
and his views have varied. Cf. Medicinische Psychol., § 10. Microcos-
mus, bk. in. ch. 2. Metaphysic, bk. in. ch. 5. Outlines of Psychol.,
part n. ch. 3. See also ft- T. Fechner, Psychophysik, chap, xxxvn.

216 PSYCHOLOGY.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER OBJECTS

are either relations to other minds, or to material things. The
material things are either the mind's own brain, on the one
hand, or anything else, on the other. The relations of a
mind to its own brain are of a unique and utterly mysteri
ous sort ; we discussed them in the last two chapters, and
can add nothing to that account.

The mind's relations to other objects than the brain are
cognitive and emotional relations exclusively, so far as we
know. It knows them, and it inwardly welcomes or rejects
them, but it has no other dealings with them. When it seems
to act upon them, it only does so through the intermediary
of its own body, so that not it but the body is what acts on
them, and the brain must first act upon the body. The
same is true when other things seem to act on it — they only
act on the body, and through that on its brain.* All that
it can do directly is to know other things, misknow or
ignore them, and to find that they interest it, in this fashion
or in that.

Now the relation of knowing is the most mysterious thing
in the world. If we ask how one thing can know another
we are led into the heart of Erkenntnisstheorie and metaphys
ics. The psychologist, for his part, does not consider the
matter so curiously as this. Finding a world before him
which he cannot but believe that he knows, and setting
himself to study his own past thoughts, or someone else's
thoughts, of what he believes to be that same world ; he
cannot but conclude that those other thoughts know it after
their fashion even as he knows it after his. Knowledge be
comes for him an ultimate relation that must be admitted,
whether it be explained or not, just like difference or re
semblance, which no one seeks to explain.

Were our topic Absolute Mind instead of being the con
crete minds of individuals dwelling in the natural world,
we could not tell whether that Mind had the function of
knowing or not, as knowing is commonly understood. We

* I purposely ignore 'clairvoyance' and action upon distant things b?
'mediums,' as not yet matters of common consent.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 217

might learn the complexion of its thoughts ; but, as we
should have no realities outside of it to compare them with,
— for if we had, the Mind would not be Absolute, — we could
not criticise them, and find them either right or wrong ; and
we should have to call them simply the thoughts, and not
the knowledge, of the Absolute Mind. Finite minds, how
ever, can be judged in a different way, because the psychol
ogist himself can go bail for the independent reality of the
objects of which they think. He knows these to exist out
side as well as inside the minds in question ; he thus knows
whether the minds think and knoiv, or only think ; and
though his knowledge is of course that of a fallible mortal,
uhere is nothing in the conditions that should make it more
likely to be wrong in this case than in any other.

Now by what tests does the psychologist decide whether
the state of mind he is studying is a bit of knowledge, or
only a subjective fact not referring to anything outside
itself?

He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state of
mind resembles his own idea of a certain reality ; or if without
resembling his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality and
refer to it by operating upon it through the bodily organs ;
or even if it resembles and operates on some other reality
that implies, and leads up to, and terminates in, the first
one, — in either or all of these cases the psychologist admits
that the state of mind takes cognizance, directly or remotely,
distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the reality's nature
and position in the world. If, on the other hand, the
mental state under examination neither resembles nor oper
ates on any of the realities known to the psychologist, he calls
it a subjective state pure and simple, possessed of no cog
nitive worth. If, again, it resemble a reality or a set of
realities as he knows them, but altogether fail to operate
on them or modify their course by producing bodily motions
which the psychologist sees, then the psychologist, like all
of us, may be in doubt. Let the mental state, for example,
occur during the sleep of its subject. Let the latter dream
of the death of a certain man, and let the man simulta
neously die. Is the dream a mere coincidence, or a veri
table cognition of the death ? Such puzzling cases are

218 PSYCHOLOGY.

what the Societies for ' Psychical Research ' are collect-
ing and trying to interpret in the most reasonable way.

If the dream were the only one of the kind the subject
ever had in his life, if the context of the death in the dream
differed in many particulars from the real death's context,
and if the dream led to no action about the death, unques
tionably we should all call it a strange coincidence, and
naught besides. But if the death in the dream had a long
context, agreeing point for point with every feature that
attended the real death ; if the subject were constantly
having such dreams, all equally perfect, and if on awaking
he had a habit of acting immediately as if they were true
and so getting 'the start' of his more tardily informed
neighbors, — we should probably all have to admit that he
had some mysterious kind of clairvoyant power, that his
dreams in an inscrutable way knew just those realities
which they figured, and that the word * coincidence ' failed
to touch the root of the matter. And whatever doubts any
one preserved would completely vanish if it should appear
that from the midst of his dream he had the power of inter
fering with the course of the reality, and making the events
in it turn this way or that, according as he dreamed they
should. Then at least it would be certain that he and the
psychologist were dealing with the same. It is by such
tests as these that we are convinced that the waking minds
of our fellows and our own minds know the same external
world.

The psychologist's attitude toivards cognition will be so
important in the sequel that we must not leave it until it is
made perfectly clear. It is a thoroughgoing dualism. It
supposes two elements, mind knowing and thing known, and
treats them as irreducible. Neither gets out of itself or
into the other, neither in any way is the other, neither
makes the other. They just stand face to face in a common
woild, and one simply knows, or is known unto, its counter
part. This singular relation is not to be expressed in any
lower terms, or translated into any more intelligible name.
Some sort of signal must be given by the thing to the mind's
brain, or the knowing will not occur — we find as a matter

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 219

of fact that the mere existence of a thing outside the brain
is not a sufficient cause for our knowing it : it must strike
the brain in some way, as well as be there, to be known.
But the brain being struck, the knowledge is constituted
by a new construction that occurs altogether in the mind.
The thing remains the same whether known or not.* And
when once there, the knowledge may remain there, what
ever becomes of the thing.

By the ancients, and by unreflecting people perhaps to
day, knowledge is explained as the passage of something
from without into the mind — the latter, so far, at least, as
its sensible affections go, being passive and receptive.
But even in mere sense-impression the duplication of the
object by an inner construction must take place. Consider,
with Professor Bowne, what happens when two people con
verse together and know each other's mind.

" No thoughts leave the mind of one and cross into the mind of the
other. When we speak of an exchange of thought, even the crudest
mind knows that this is a mere figure of speech. ... To perceive
another's thought, we must construct his thought within ourselves; . . .
this thought is our own and is strictly original with us. At the same
time we owe it to the other ; and if it had not originated with him, it
would probably not have originated with us. But what has the other
done ? . . . This : by an entirely mysterious world-order, the speaker
is enabled to produce a series of signs which are totally unlike [the]
thought, but which, by virtue of the same mysterious order, act as a
series of incitements upon the hearer, so that he constructs within
himself the corresponding mental state. The act of the speaker consists
in availing himself of the proper incitements. The act of the hearer is
immediately only the reaction of the soul against the incitement. . . .
All communion between finite minds is of this sort. . . . Probably no
reflecting person would deny this conclusion, but when we say that
what is thus true of perception of another's thought is equally true of
the perception of the outer world in general, many minds will be
disposed to question, and not a few will deny it outright. Yet there is
no alternative but to affirm that to perceive the universe we must
construct it in thought, and that our knowledge of the universe is but
the unfolding of the mind's inner nature. . . . By describing the mind
as a waxen tablet, and things as impressing themselves upon it, we
seem to get great insight until we think to ask where this extended
tablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the percep-

* I disregard consequences which may later come to the thing from the
f*M*t that it is known. The knowing per se in no wise affects the thing.

220 PSYCHOLOGY.

tive act would be explained even if they did. . . . The immediate
antecedents of sensation and perception are a series of nervous changes
in the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed only
in and through these nervous changes. But these are totally unlike
the objects assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive the
mind as in the light, and in direct contact with its objects, the
imagination at least would be comforted ; but when we conceive the
mind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the dark
chamber of the skull, and then not in contact with the objects per
ceived, but only with a series of nerve -changes of which, moreover, it
knows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk
of pictures, impressions, etc., ceases because of the lack of all the
conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that
we shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light
and reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and the
senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous
labyrinth, where the object is entirely displaced by a set of nervous
changes which are totally unlike anything but themselves. Finally,
we land in the dark chamber of the skull. The object has gone com
pletely, and knowledge has not yet appeared. Nervous signs are the
raw material of all knowledge of the outer world according to the most
decided realism. But in order to pass beyond these signs into a
knowledge of the outer world, we must posit an interpreter who shall
read back these signs into their objective meaning. But that inter
preter, again, must implicitly contain the meaning of the universe
within itself; and these signs are really but excitations which cause the
soul to unfold what is within itself. Inasmuch as by common consent
the soul communicates with the outer world only through these signs,
and never comes nearer to the object than such signs can bring it, it
follows that the principles of interpretation must be in the mind itself,
and that the resulting construction is primarily only an expression of the
mind's own nature. All reaction is of this sort; it expresses the nature
of the reacting agent, and knowledge comes under the same head,
this fact makes it necessary for us either to admit a pre-established
harmony between the laws and nature of thought and the laws and
nature of things, or else to allow that the objects of perception, the
universe as it appears, are purely phenomenal, being but the way in
which the mind reacts against the ground of its sensations." *

The dualism of Object and Subject and their pre-estab
lished harmony are what the psychologist as such must
assume, whatever ulterior monistic philosophy he may, as
an individual who has the right also to be a metaphysician,
have in reserve. I hope that this general point is now

* B. P. Bowne: Metaphysics, pp. 407-10. Of. also Lotze: Logik,
§§ 308, 326-7.

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 221

made clear, so that we may leave it, and descend to some
distinctions of detail.

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically
distinguishable : we may call them respectively knowledge
of acquaintance and knowledge-dbout. Most languages ex
press the distinction; thus, yrtiorai, eidevai\ noscere, scire;
kennen, ivissen; connaitre, savoir.* I am acquainted with
many people and things, which I know very little about,
except their presence in the places where I have met them.
I know the color blue when I see it, and the flavor of a
pear when I taste it ; I know an inch when I move my
finger through it ; a second of time, when I feel it pass ;
an effort of attention when I make it ; a difference between
two things when I notice it ; but about the inner nature of
these facts or what makes them what they are, I can say
nothing at all. I cannot impart acquaintance with them
to any one who has not already made it himself. I cannot
describe them, make a blind man guess what blue is like,
define to a child a syllogism, or tell a philosopher in just
what respect distance is just what it is, and differs from
other forms of relation. At most, I can say to my friends,
Go to certain places and act in certain ways, and these
objects will probably come. All the elementary natures of
the world, its highest genera, the simple qualities of matter
and mind, together with the kinds of relation that subsist
between them, must either not be known at all, or known
in this dumb way of acquaintance without knowledge-about.
In minds able to speak at all there is, it is true, some knowl
edge about everything. Things can at least be classed, and
the times of their appearance told. But in general, the less
we analyze a thing, and the fewer of its relations we per
ceive, the less we know about it and the more our famili
arity with it is of the acquaintance-type. The two kinds
of knowledge are, therefore, as the human mind practi
cally exerts them, relative terms. That is, the same thought
of a thing may be called knowledge-about it in comparison
with a simpler thought, or acquaintance with it in compari-

* Of. John Grote : Explorutio Philosophica, p. 60 ; H. Helmholtz,
Popular Scientific Lectures, London, p. 308-9.

222 PSYCHOLOGY.

son with a thought of it that is more articulate and explicit
still.

The grammatical sentence expresses this. Its ' subject*
stands for an object of acquaintance which, by the addition
of the predicate, is to get something known about it. We
may already know a good deal, when we hear the subject
named — its name may have rich connotations. But, know
we much or little then, we know more still when the sen
tence is done. We can relapse at will into a mere condi
tion of acquaintance with an object by scattering our
attention and staring at it in a vacuous trance-like way.
We can ascend to knowledge about it by rallying our wits
and proceeding to notice and analyze and think. What we
are only acquainted with is only present to our minds ; we
have it, or the idea of it. But when we know about it, we
do more than merely have it ; we seem, as we think over its
relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate
upon it with our thought. The words feeling and thought
give voice to the antithesis. Through feelings we become
acquainted with things, but only by our thoughts do we
know about them. Feelings are the germ and starting
point of cognition, thoughts the developed tree. The mini
mum of grammatical subject, of objective presence, of reality
known about, the mere beginning of knowledge, must be
named by the word that says the least. Such a word is the
interjection, as lo ! there! eccoj voild ! or the article or
demonstrative pronoun introducing the sentence, as the, it,
that. In Chapter XII we shall see a little deeper into what
this distinction, between the mere mental having or feeling
of an object and the thinking of it, portends.

The mental states usually distinguished as feelings are
the emotions, and the sensations we get from skin, muscle,
viscus, eye, ear, nose, and palate. The 'thoughts,' as
recognized in popular parlance, are the conceptions and
judgments. When we treat of these mental states in par
ticular we shall have to say a word about the cognitive
function and value of each. It may perhaps be well to
notice now that our senses only give us acquaintance with
facts of body, and that of the mental states of other persons

THE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 223

we only have conceptual knowledge. Of our own past
states of mind we take cognizance in a peculiar way. They
are ' objects of memory,' and appear to us endowed with
a sort of warmth and intimacy that makes the perception
of them seem more like a process of sensation than like a
thought.

CHAPTER IX.*
THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.

WE now begin our study of the mind from within. Most
books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts,
and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage
from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical
method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensa
tion by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a
teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we
call simple sensations are results of discriminative atten
tion, pushed often to a very high degree. It is astonishing
what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the
outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless
contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves
later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the
whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations,
being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in
psychology is one of these suppositions. The only thing
which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset is
the fact of thinking itself, and that must first be taken up
and analyzed. If sensations then prove to be amongst the
elements of the thinking, we shall be no worse off as re
spects them than if we had taken them for granted at the
start.

The first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking
of some sort goes on. I use the word thinking, in accordance
with what was said on p. 186, for every form of conscious
ness indiscriminately. If we could say in English 'it
thinks,' as we say ' it rains ' or 'it blows,' we should be

* A good deal of this chapter is reprinted from an article 'On some
Omissions of Introspective Psychology ' which appeared in ' Mind ' foi
January 1884.

324

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 225

stating tlio fact most simply and with the minimum of as
sumption. As we cannot, we must simply say that thought
goes on.

FIVE CHAKACTEES IN THOUGHT.

How does it go on ? We notice immediately five impor
tant characters in the process, of which it shall be the dutj
of the present chapter to treat in a general way :

1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal con
sciousness.

2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always
changing.

3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sen
sibly continuous.

4) It always appears to deal with objects independent
of itself.

5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the*
exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects — chooses from
among them, in a word — all the while.

In considering these five points successively, we shall
have to plunge in medias res as regards our vocabulary, and
use psychological terms which can only be adequately de
fined in later chapters of the book. But every one knows
what the terms mean in a rough way ; and it is only in a
rough way that we are now to take them. This chapter is
like a painter's first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in
which no niceties appear.

1) Thought tends to Personal Form.

When I say every thought is part of a personal con
sciousness, l personal consciousness ' is one of the terms in
question. Its meaning we know so long as no one asks us
to define it, but to give an accurate account of it is the most
difficult of philosophic tasks. This task we must confront
in the next chapter ; here a preliminary word will suffice.

In this room — this lecture-room, say — there are a mul
titude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere
mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself
and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-
together. They are neither : no one of them is separate,

226 PSYCHOLOGY.

but each belongs with certain others and with none beside.
My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your
thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in
the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's
thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no
experience of its like. The only states of consciousness
that we naturally deal with are found in personal con
sciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and
you's.

Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself.
There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought
even comes into direct sight of a thought in another per
sonal consciousness than its own. Absolute insulation,
irreducible pluralism, is the law. It seems as if the ele
mentary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that
thought, but my thought, every thought being oivned. Neither
contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of
quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together
which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to differ
ent personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts
are the most absolute breaches in nature. Everyone wil?
recognize this to be true, so long as the existence of some
thing corresponding to the term ' personal mind ' is all that
is insisted on, without any particular view of its nature
being implied. On these terms the personal self rather
than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum
in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not ' feel
ings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' * No
psychology, at any rate, can question the existence of per
sonal selves. The worst a psychology can do is so to
interpret the nature of these selves as to rob them of their
worth. A French writer, speaking of our ideas, says some
where in a fit of anti-spiritualistic excitement that, mislej
by certain peculiaritities which they display, we ' end by
personifying' the procession which they make, — such per
sonification being regarded by him as a great philosophic
blunder on our part. It could only be a blunder if the
notion of personality meant something essentially different

* B. P. Bowne : Metaphysics, p. 362.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 227

from anything to be found in the mental procession. But if
that procession be itself the very ' original ' of the notion of
personality, to personify it cannot possibly be wrong. It is
already personified. There are no marks of personality to
be gathered aliunde, and then found lacking in the train of
thought. It has them all already ; so that to whatever
farther analysis we may subject that form of personal self
hood under which thoughts appear, it is, and must remain,
true that the thoughts which psychology studies do contin
ually tend to appear as parts of personal selves.

I say ' tend to appear' rather than 'appear,' on account
of those facts of sub- conscious personality, automatic writ
ing, etc., of which we studied a few in the last chapter.
The buried feelings and thoughts proved now to exist in
hysterical anaesthetics, in recipients of post-hypnotic sug
gestion, ttc., themselves are parts of secondary personal
selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and
contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from commu
nication with the regular and normal self of the individual ;
but still they form conscious unities, have continuous mem
ories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or
adopt names that are suggested ; and, in short, are entirely
worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now
commonly given them. According to M. Janet these second
ary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the
splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two
parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other
appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman
has. For our present purpose it is unimportant whether
this account of the origin of secondary selves is applicable
to all possible cases of them or not, for it certainly is true
of a large number of them. Now although the size of a
secondary self thus formed will depend on the number of
thoughts that are thus split-off from the main conscious
ness, the form of it tends to personality, and the later
thoughts pertaining to it remember the earlier ones and
adopt them as their own. M. Janet caught the actual mo
ment of inspissation (so to speak) of one of these secondary
personalities in his anaesthetic somnambulist Lucie. He
found that when this young woman's attention was absorbed

228 PSYCHOLOGY,

in conversation with a third party, her anaesthetic hand
would write simple answers to questions whispered to her by
himself. " Do you hear ?" he asked. " No" was the uncon
sciously written reply. "But to answer you must hear."
" Yes, quite so." "Then how do you manage?" " I don't
knoiu" " There must be some one who hears me." " Yes."
" Who ?" " Someone other them Lucie." " Ah ! another per
son. Shall we give her a name?" "No." "Yes, it will
be more convenient." " Well, Adrienne, then." " Once bap<
tized, the subconscious personage," M. Janet continues*
" grows more definitely outlined and displays better her
psychological characters. In particular she shows us that
she is conscious of the feelings excluded from the conscious
ness of the primary or normal personage. She it is who
tells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the little
linger in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensa
tions." *

In other cases the adoption of the name by the second
ary self is more spontaneous. I have seen a number of
incipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly
* developed,' who immediately and of their own accord
write and speak in the name of departed spirits. These
may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real per
sons formerly known to the subject, or altogether imagi
nary beings. Without prejudicing the question of real
1 spirit- control ' in the more developed sorts of trance-
utterance, I incline to think that these (often deplorably
unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of an
inferior fraction of the subject's own natural mind, set free
from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern
fixed by the prejudices of the social environment. In a
spiritualistic community we get optimistic messages, whilst
in an ignorant Catholic village the secondary personage
calls itself by the name of a demon, and proffers blas
phemies and obscenities, instead of telling us how happy it
is in the summer-land. f

* L' Automatisme Psychologique, p. 318.

f Cf. A. Constaus : Relation sur uue Epidemic d'hyslero-demonopathie
en 1861. 2rne ed. Paris, 1863.— Chiap e Franzolini: L'Epidemia d'istero-
demonopatie in Verzegnis. Reggio, 1879. — See also J. Kernel's little
work : Nachricht von dem Vorkornmen des Besessenseins. 1836.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT, 229

Beneath these tracts of thought, which, however rudi
mentary, are still organized selves with a memory, habits,
and sense of their own identity, M. Janet thinks that the
tacts of catalepsy in hysteric patients drive us to suppose
that there are thoughts quite unorganized and impersonal
A patient in cataleptic trance (which can be produced arti
ficially in certain hypnotized subjects) is without memory
on waking, and seems insensible and unconscious as long
as the cataleptic condition lasts. If, however, one raises
the arm of such a subject it stays in that position, and the
whole body can thus be moulded like wax under the hands
of the operator, retaining for a considerable time whatever
attitude he communicates to it. In hysterics whose arm,
for example, is anaesthetic, the same thing may happen.
The anaesthetic arm may remain passively in positions which
it is made to assume ; or if the hand be taken and made to
hold a pencil and trace a certain letter, it will continue
tracing that letter indefinitely on the paper. These acts,
until recently, were supposed to be accompanied by no
consciousness at all : they were physiological reflexes. M.
Janet considers with much more plausibility that feeling
escorts them. The feeling is probably merely that of the
position or movement of the limb, and it produces no more
than its natural effects when it discharges into the motor
centres which keep the position maintained, or the movement
incessantly renewed.* Such thoughts as these, says M.
Janet, " are known by no one, for disaggregated sensations
reduced to a state of mental dust are not synthetized in
any personality." f He admits, however, that these very
same unutterably stupid thoughts tend to develop memory,
— the cataleptic ere long moves her arm at a bare hint ; so
that they form no important exception to the law that all
thought tends to assume the form of personal conscious
ness.

2) Thought is in Constant Change.

I do not mean necessarily that no one state of mind has
any duration — even if true, that would be hard to establish,
*For the Physiology of this compare the chapter oil the Will
* Loc. cit. p. 316.

230 PSYCHOLOGY.

The change which I have more particularly in view is thai
which takes place in sensible intervals of time ; and the result
on which I wish to lay stress is this, that no state once gone
can recur and be identical witli ivhat it ivas before. Let us
begin with Mr. Shadworth Hodgson's description :

" I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or
sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when 1
look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of,
or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a
sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectly
still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will ; but whether
I think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, I
always have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that I may
have also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this suc
cession. Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be
conscious at all. . . . The chain of consciousness is a sequence of
diff Brents." *

Such a description as this can awaken no possible pro
test from any one. We all recognize as different great
classes of our conscious states. Now we are seeing, now
hearing ; now reasoning, now willing ; now recollecting, now
expecting ; now loving, now hating ; and in a hundred other
ways we know our minds to be alternately engaged. But
all these are complex states. The aim of science is always
to reduce complexity to simplicity ; and in psychological
science we have the celebrated 'theory of ideas9 which,
admitting the great difference among each other of what
may be called concrete conditions of mind, seeks to show
how this is all the resultant effect of variations in the cora-
bination of certain simple elements of consciousness that
always remain the same. These mental atoms or molecules
are what Locke called 'simple ideas.' Some of Locke's
successors made out that the only simple ideas were the
sensations strictly so called. Which ideas the simple ones
may be does not, however, now concern us. It is enough
that certain philosophers have thought they could see
under the dissolving-view-appearance of the mind elemen
tary facts of any sort that remained unchanged amid the
flow.

*The Philosophy of Reflection, i. 248, 290.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 231

And the view of these philosophers has been called little
into question, for our common experience seems at first
sight to corroborate it entirely. Are not the sensations we
get from the same object, for example, always the same ?
Does not the same piano-key, struck with the same force,
make us hear in the same way ? Does not the same grass
give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same
feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sen
sation no matter how many times we put our nose to the
same flask of cologne ? It seems a piece of metaphysical
sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close at
tention to the matter shows that there is no proof that the
same bodily sensation is ever got by us twice.

What is got tioice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same
note over and over again ; we see the same quality of green,
or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same
species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physi
cal and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in,
seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought,
and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas '
of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time
later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how invet
erate is our habit of not attending to sensations as subjec
tive facts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones to
pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence
they reveal. The grass out of the window now looks to me
of the same green in the sun as in the shade, and yet a
painter would have to paint one part of it dark brown,
arother part bright yellow, to give its realj Sensational effect.
We take no heed, as a rule, of the different way in which
the same things look and sound arid smell at different dis
tances and under different circumstances. The sameness
of the things is what we are concerned to ascertain ; and
any sensations that assure us of that will probably be con
sidered in a rough way to be the same with each other.
This is what makes off-hand testimony about the subjective
identity of different sensations well-nigh worthless as a
proof of the fact. The entire history of Sensation is a com
mentary on our inability to tell whether two sensations
received apart are exactly alike. What appeals to our

232 PSYCHOLOGY.

attention far more than the absolute quality or quantity oi
a given sensation is its ratio to whatever other sensations
we may have at the same time. When everything is dark
a somewhat less dark sensation makes us see an object
white. Helmholtz calculates that the white marble painted
in a picture representing an architectural view by moon
light is, when seen by daylight, from ten to twenty thousand
times brighter than the real moonlit marble would be.*

Such a difference as this could never have been sensibly
learned ; it had to be inferred from a series of indirect con
siderations. There are facts which make us believe that
our sensibility is altering all the time, so that the same
object cannot easily give us the same sensation over again.
The eye's sensibility to light is at its maximum when the
eye is first exposed, and blunts itself with surprising rapid
ity. A long night's sleep will make it see things twice as
brightly on wakening, as simple rest by closure will make
it see them later in the day.f We feel things differently
; according as we are sleepy or awake, hungry or full, fresh
; or tired ; differently at night and in the morning, differently
in summer and in winter, and above all things differently in
childhood, manhood, and old age. Yet we never doubt that
our feelings reveal the same world, with the same sensible
qualities and the same sensible things occupying it. The
difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference
of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or
when we are in different organic moods. What was bright
and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The
bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is
sad.

To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, fol
lowing the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always
undergoing an essential change, must be added another
presumption, based on what must happen in the brain.
\ Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. Foi
an identical sensation to recur it would have to occur the
/second time in an unmodified brain. But as this, strictly

* Populare Wissenschaftliche Vortrage, Drittes Heft (1876). p. 72.
t Fick, in L. Hermann's Handb. d. Pbysiol. , Bd. in. Th. i. D. 225.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 233

speaking, is a physiological impossibility, so is an un
modified feeling an impossibility ; for to every brain-modi^
fication, however small, must correspond a change of equal
amount in the feeling which the brain subserves.

All this would be true if even sensations came to us pure
and single and not combined into ' things.' Even then we
should have to confess that, however we might in ordinary
conversation speak of getting the same sensation again, we
never in strict theoretic accuracy could do so ; and that
whatever was true of the river of life, of the river of elemen
tary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus,
that we never descend twice into the same stream.

But if the assumption of ' simple ideas of sensation '
recurring in immutable shape is so easily shown to be
baseless, how much more baseless is the assumption of
immutability in the larger masses of our thought !

For there it is obvious and palpable that our state of
mind is never precisely the same. Every thought we have
of a given fact is, strictly speaking, unique, and only bears a
resemblance of kind with our other thoughts of the same
fact. When the identical fact recurs, we must think of it
in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle,
apprehend it in different relations from those in which it
last appeared. And the thought by which we cognize it is
the thought of it-in-those-relations, a thought suffused
with the consciousness of all that dim context. Often we
are ourselves struck at the strange differences in our suc
cessive views of the same thing. We wonder how we ever
could have opined as we did last month about a certain
matter. We have outgrown the possibility of that state of
mind, we know not how. From one year to another we see
things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real,
and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to
care the world for are shrunken to shadows ; the women,
once so divine, the stars, the woods, and the waters, how
now so dull and common ! the young girls that brought an
aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable exist
ences ; the pictures so empty ; and as for the books, what
was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in
John Mill so full of weight? Instead of all this, more

234 PSYCHOLOGY.

zestful than ever is the work, the work ,- and fuller and
deeper the import of common duties and of common goods.
But what here strikes us so forcibly on the flagrant
scale exists on every scale, down to the imperceptible
transition from one hour's outlook to that of the next. Ex
perience is remoulding us every moment, and our mental
reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our
experience of the whole world up to that date. The analo
gies of brain-physiology must again be appealed to to
corroborate our view.

Our earlier chapters have taught us to believe that,
whilst we think, our brain changes, and that, like the auro
ra borealis, its whole internal equilibrium shifts with every
pulse of change. The precise nature of the shifting at a
given moment is a product of many factors. The acciden
tal state of local nutrition or blood-supply may be among
them. But just as one of them certainly is the influence of
outward objects on the sense-organs during the moment,
so is another certainly the very special susceptibility in
which the organ has been left at that moment by all it
has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly
determined by the nature of this entire past succession.
Alter the latter in any part, and the brain-state must be
\ somewhat different. Each present brain-state is a record
in which the eye of Omniscience might read all the fore
gone history of its owner. It is out of the question, then,
that any total brain-state should identically recur. Some
thing like it may recur ; but to suppose it to recur would
be equivalent to the absurd admission that all the states
that had intervened between its two appearances had been
pure nonentities, and that the organ after their passage
was exactly as it was before. And (to consider shorter
periods) just as, in the senses, an impression feels very dif
ferently according to what has preceded it ; as one color
succeeding another is modified by the contrast, silence
sounds delicious after noise, and a note, when the scale is
sung up, sounds unlike itself when the scale is sung down ;
as the presence of certain lines in a figure changes the ap
parent form of the other lines, and as in music the whole
aesthetic effect comes from the manner in which one set of

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 235

sounds alters our feeling of another ; so, in thought, we
must admit that those portions of the brain that have just
been maximally excited retain a kind of soreness which is
a condition of our present consciousness, a codetenninant
of how and what we now shall feel.*

Ever some tracts are waning in tension, some waxing,
whilst others actively discharge. The states of tension
have as positive an influence as any in determining the
total condition, and in deciding what the psychosis shall be.
All we know of submaximal nerve-irritations, and of the
summation of apparently ineffective stimuli, tends to show
that TIO changes in the brain are physiologically ineffective,
and that presumably none are bare of psychological result.
But as the brain-tension shifts from one relative state of
equilibrium to another, like the gyrations of a kaleido-

I scope, now rapid and now slow, is it likely that its faithful
psychic concomitant is heavier-footed than itself, and that
it cannot match each one of the organ's irradiations by a
shifting inward iridescence of its own ? But if it can do
this, its inward iridescences must be infinite, for the brain-
redistributions are in infinite variety. If so coarse a thing
as a telephone-plate can be made to thrill for years and
never reduplicate its inward condition, how much more
must this be the case with the infinitely delicate brain ?

I am sure that this concrete and total manner of regard
ing the mind's changes is the only true manner, difficult as
it may be to carry it out in detail. If anything seems ob
scure about it, it will grow clearer as we advance. Mean
while, if it be true, it is certainly also true that no two
' ideas ' are ever exactly the same, which is the proposition
we started to prove. The proposition is more important
theoretically than it at first sight seems. For it makes it

*It need of course not follow, because a total brain-state does not re
cur, that no point of the brain can ever be twice in the same condition.
That would be as improbable a consequence as that in the sea a wave-crest
should never come twice at the same point of space. What can hardly
come twice is an identical combination of wave-forms all with their crests/ 1.
and hollows reoccupying identical places. For such a total combina-'
tionasthis is the analogue of the brain-state to which our actual conscious
ness at any moment is due.

236 PSYCHOLOGY.

already impossible for us to follow obediently in the foot
prints of eitlier the Lockian or the Herbartian school,
schools which have had almost unlimited influence in Ger
many and among ourselves. No doubt it is often con
venient to formulate the mental facts in an atomistic sort
of way, and to treat the higher states of consciousness as if
they were all built out of unchanging simple ideas. It is
convenient often to treat curves as if they were composed
of small straight lines, and electricity and nerve-force as if
they were fluids. But in the one case as in the other we
must never forget that we are talking symbolically, and
that there is nothing in nature to answer to our words. A
permanently existing ' idea ' or * Vorstellung ' which makes its
i appearance before the footlights of consciousness at periodical
' intervals, is as mythological an entity as the Jack of Spades.

What makes it convenient to use the mythological for
mulas is the whole organization of speech, which, as was
remarked a while ago, was not made by psychologists, but
by men who were as a rule only interested in the facts their
mental states revealed. They only spoke of their states as
ideas of this or of that thing. "What wonder, then, that the
thought is most easily conceived under the law of the thing
whose name it bears ! If the thing is composed of parts,
then we suppose that the thought of the thing must be
composed of the thoughts of the parts. If one part of the
thing have appeared in the same thing or in other things on
former occasions, why then we must be having even now the
very same ' idea ' of that part which was there on those occa
sion s. If the thing is simple, its thought is simple. If it
is multitudinous, it must require a multitude of thoughts
to think it. If a succession, only a succession of thoughts
can know it. If permanent, its thought is permanent. And
so on ad libitum. What after all is so natural as to assume
that one object, called by one name, should be known by
one affection of the mind ? But, if language must thus in
fluence us, the agglutinative languages, and even Greek and
Latin with their declensions, would be the better guides.
Names did not appear in them inalterable, but changed
their shape to suit the context in which they lay. It must
have been easier then than now to conceive of the same

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 237

object as being thought of at different times in non-identical
conscious states.

This, too, will grow clearer as we proceed. Meanwhile
a necessary consequence of the belief in permanent self-
identical psychic facts that absent themselves and recur
periodically is the Humian doctrine that our thought is
composed of separate independent parts and is not a sen
sibly continuous stream. That this doctrine entirely mis
represents the natural appearances is what I next shall try
to show.

3) Within each personal consciousness, thought is sensibly con
tinuous.

I can only define ' continuous ' as that which is with
out breach, crack, or division. I have already said that
the breach from one mind to another is perhaps the greats
est breach in nature. The only breaches that can well be
conceived to occur within the limits of a single mind would
either be interruptions, time-gaps during which the con
sciousness went out altogether to come into existence again
at a later moment ; or they would be breaks in the quality^
or content, of the thought, so abrupt that the segment that
followed had no connection whatever with the one that
went before. The proposition that within each personal
consciousness thought feels continuous, means two things:

1. That even where there is a time-gap the conscious
ness after it feels as if it belonged together with the con
sciousness before it, as another part of the same self;

2. That the changes from one moment to another in the
quality of the consciousness are never absolutely abrupt.

The case of the time-gaps, as the simplest, shall be taken
first. And first of all a word about time-gaps of which the
consciousness may not be itself aware.

On page 200 we saw that such time-gaps existed, and
that they might be more numerous than is usually supposed.
If the consciousness is not aware of them, it cannot feel
them as interruptions. In the unconsciousness produced
by nitrous oxide and other anaesthetics, in that of epilepsy
and fainting, the broken edges of the sentient life may

238 PSYCHOLOGY.

meet and merge over the gap, much as the feelings of space
of the opposite margins of the ' blind spot ' meet and
merge over that objective interruption to the sensitiveness
of the eye. Such consciousness as this, whatever it be for
the onlooking psyche logist, is for itself unbroken» It feds
unbroken ; a waking day of it is sensibly a unit as long as
that day lasts, in the sense in which the hours themselves
are units, as having all their parts next each other, with no
intrusive alien substance between. To expect the con
sciousness to feel the interruptions of its objective con
tinuity as gaps, would be like expecting the eye to feel a
gap of silence because it does not hear, or the ear to feel a
gap of darkness because it does not see. So much for the
gaps that are unfelt.

With the felt gaps the case is different. On waking from
sleep, we usually know that we have been unconscious,
and we often have an accurate judgment of how long. The
judgment here is certainly an inference from sensible signs,
and its ease is due to long practice in the particular field.*
The result of it, however, is that the consciousness is, for
itself, not what it was in the former case, but interrupted
and discontinuous, in the mere sense of the words. But
in the other sense of continuity, the sense of the parts being
inwardly connected and belonging together because they
are parts of a common whole, the consciousness remains
sensibly continuous and one. What now is the common
whole ? The natural name for it is myself, I, or me.

When Paul and Peter wake up in the same bed, and
recognize that they have been asleep, each one of them
mentally reaches back and makes connection with but one
of the two streams of thought which were broken by the
sleeping hours. As the current of an electrode buried in
the ground unerringly finds its way to its own similarly
buried mate, across no matter how much intervening earth ;
so Peter's present instantly finds out Peter's past, and never
by mistake knits itself on to that of Paul. Paul's thought
in turn is as little liable to go astray. The past thought of
Peter is appropriated by the present Peter alone. He may

* The accurate registration of the ' how \ona- ' is still a little mysterious'

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 239

have a knowledge, and a correct one too, of what Paul's
last drowsy states of mind were as he sank into sleep, but it
is an entirely different sort of knowledge from that which he
has ot his own last states. He remembers his own states,
whilst he only conceives Paul's. Remembrance is like direct
feeling ; its object is suffused with a warmth and intimacy
to which no object of mere conception ever attains. This
quality of warmth and intimacy and immediacy is what
Peter's present thought also possesses for itself. So sure
as this present is me, is mine, it says, so sure is anything
else that comes with the same warmth and intimacy and
immediacy, me and mine. What the qualities called
warmth and intimacy may in themselves be will have to be
matter for future consideration. But whatever past feel-
ino-s appear with those qualities must be admitted to re
ceive the greeting of the present mental state, to be owned
by it, and accepted as belonging together with it in a com
mon self. This community of self is what the time-gap
cannot break in twain, and is why a present thought, al
though not ignorant of the time-gap, can still regard itself
as continuous with certain chosen portions of the past.

Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped
up in bits. Such words as * chain ' or c train ' do not de
scribe it fitly ar; it presents itself in the first instance. It
is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are
the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In
talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or of subjective life.

But now there appears, even within the limits of the
same self, and between thoughts all of which alike have
this same sense of belonging together, a kind of jointing and
separateness among the parts, of which this statement
seems to take no account. I refer to the breaks that are
produced by sudden contrasts in the. quality of the successive
segments of the stream of thought If the words < chain '
and ' train ' had no natural fitness in them, how came such
words to be used at all ? Does not a loud explosion rend
the consciousness upon which it abruptly breaks, in twain ?
Does not every sudden shock, appearance of a new object,

240 PSYCHOLOGY.

or change in a sensation, create a real interruption, sensibly
felt as such, which cuts the conscious stream across at the
moment at which it appears ? Do not such interruptions
smite us every hour of our lives, and have we the right, in
their presence, still to call our consciousness a continuous
stream ?

This objection is based partly on a confusion and partly
on a superficial introspective view.

The confusion is between the thoughts themselves, taken
as subjective facts, and the things of which they are aware.
It is natural to make this confusion, but easy to avoid it
when once put on one's guard. The things are discrete
and discontinuous ; they do pass before us in a train or
chain, making often explosive appearances and rending
each other in twain. But their comings and goings and
contrasts no more break the flow of the thought that thinks
them than they break the time and the space in which they
lie. A silence may be broken by a thunder-clap, and we
may be so stunned and confused for a moment by the shock
as to give no instant account to ourselves of what has hap
pened. But that very confusion is a mental state, and a
state that passes us straight over from the silence to the
sound. The transition between the thought of one object
and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought
than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a
part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the
bamboo.

The superficial introspective view is the overlooking,
even when the things are contrasted with each other moet
violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still re
main between the thoughts by whose means they are
cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the
awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues ; for
what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder
pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-
with-it.* Our feeling of the same objective thunder, com
ing in this way, is quite different from what it would be

* Of. Brentano; Psychologic, vol. i. pp. 219-20. Altogether this
chapter of Brentano's on the Unity of Consciousness is as good as anything
with which I am acquainted.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 241

were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The
thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence ;
but i\\s feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence
as just gone ; and it would be difficult to find in the actual
concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the
present as not to have an inkling of anything that went be
fore. Here, again, language works against our perception
of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its
thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else.
What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for,
with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to
be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them
are always things known a moment ago more clearly ; others
are things to be known more clearly a moment hence. * Our
own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things
of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably
accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know. We

* Honor to whom honor is due ! The most explicit acknowledgment I
have anywhere found of all this is in a buried and forgotten paper by the
Rev. Jas. Wills, on 'Accidental Association/ in the Transactions of the
Royal Irish Academy, vol xxr. part i (1846). Mr. Wills writes :

"At every instant of conscious thought there is a certain sum of per
ceptions, or reflections, or both together, present, and together constituting
one whole state of apprehension. Of this some definite portion may be far
more distinct than all the rest ; and the rest be iu consequence propor-
tionably vague, even to the limit of obliteration. But still, within this
limit, the most dim shade of perception enters into, and in some infinites
imal degree modifies, the whole existing slate. This state will thus be in
some way modified by any sensation or emotion, or act of distinct attention,
that may give prominence to any part of it ; so that the actual result is
capable of the utmost variation, according to the person or the occasion.
... To any portion of the entire scope here described there may be a
special direction of the attention, and this special direction is recognized
as strictly what is recognized as the idea present to the mind. This idea is
evidently not commensurate with the entire state of apprehension, and
much perplexity has arisen from not observing this fact. However deeply
we may suppose the attention to be engaged by any thought, any consider
able alteration of the surrounding phenomena would still be perceived; the
most abstruse demonstration iu this room would not prevent a listener,
however absorbed, from noticing the sudden extinction of the lights. Our
mental states have always an essential unity, such that each state of appre
hension, however variously compounded, is a single whole, of which every
component is, therefore, strictly apprehended (so far as it is apprehended)
as a part. Such is the elementary basis from which all our intellectual
operations commence."

242 PSYCHOLOGY.

think ; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat
of the thinking. If the thinking be our thinking, it must
be suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth
and intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether the
warmth and intimacy be anything more than the feeling of
the same old body always there, is a matter for the next
chapter to decide. Whatever the content of the ego may be,
it is habitually felt with everything else by us humans,
and must form a liaison between all the things of which we
become successively aware. *

On this gradualness in the changes of our mental con
tent the principles of nerve-action can throw some more
light. When studying, in Chapter III, the summation of
nervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain can be
supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the
inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the
result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our igno
rance, what in each instance the modifications ought to be.
The commonest modifications in sense-perception are
known as the phenomena of contrast. In aesthetics they
are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain
particular orders in a series of impressions give. In
thought, strictly and narrowly so called, they are unques
tionably that consciousness of the whence and the luhither
that always accompanies its flows. If recently the brain-
tract a was vividly excited, and then b, and now vividly c,
the total present consciousness is not produced simply by
c's excitement, but also by the dying vibrations of a and b
as well. If we want to represent the brain-process we
must write it thus : ^c — three different processes coexist-

a

ing, and correlated with them a thought which is no one
of the three thoughts which they would have produced had
each of them occurred alone. But whatever this fourth
thought may exactly be, it seems impossible that it should
not be something like each of the three other thoughts
whose tracts are concerned in its production, though in a
fast-waning phase.

* Compare the charming passage in Taine on Intelligence (N. Y. ed.),
i. 83-4.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 24B

It all goes back to what we said in another connection
only a few pages ago (p. 233). As the total neurosis changes,
so does the total psychosis change. But as the changes of
neurosis are never absolutely discontinuous, so must the
successive psychoses shade gradually into each other,
although their rate of change may be much faster at one
moment than at the next.

This difference in the rate of change lies at the basis of
a difference of subjective states of which we ought immedi
ately to speak. When the rate is slow we are aware of the
object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable
way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation,
a transition from it, or 'between it and something else. As
we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stveam of
our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different
pace of its parts. Like a bird's life, it seems to be made of
an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of
language expresses this, where every thought is expressed
in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The
resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imagina
tions of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be
held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contem
plated without changing ; the places of flight are filled with
thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most
part obtain between the matters contemplated in the
periods of comparative rest.

Let us call the resting-places the l substantive parts,' and
the places of flight the ' transitive parts,' of the stream of
thought. It then appears that the main end of our
thinking is at all times the attainment of some other sub
stantive part than the one from which we have just been
dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the
transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclu
sion to another.

Now it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the tran
sitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights
to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the
conclusion is reached is really annihilating them. Whilst
if we wait till the conclusion le reached, it so exceeds them

244 PSYCHOLOGY

In vigor and stability fihat it quite eclipses and swallows
them up in its glare. Leo anyone try to cut a thought
across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he
will see how difficult the introspective observation of the
transitive tracts is. The rush of the thought is so headlong
that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before
we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and
we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snow-
flake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal
but a drop, so, instead of catching tho feeling of relation
moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive
thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically
taken, and with Its function, tendency, and particular
meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. Tho attempt
at introspective analysis in these cases is in fact like seiz
ing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up
the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks.
And the challenge to produce these psychoses, which is
sure to be thrown by doubting psychologists at anyone
who contends for their existence, is as unfair as Zeno's
treatment of the advocates of motion, when, asking them
to point out in what place an arrow is when it moves, he
argues the falsity of their thesis from their inability to
make to so preposterous a question an immediate reply.

The results of this introspective difficulty are baleful.
If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thought's
stream be so hard, then the great blunder to which all
schools are liable must be the failure to register them, and
the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the
stream. Were we not ourselves a moment since in danger
of ignoring any feeling transitive between the silence and
the thunder, and of treating their boundary as a sort of
break in the mind ? Now such ignoring as this has histor
ically worked in two ways. One set of thinkers have been
led by it to Sensationalism. Unable to lay their hands on any
coarse feelings corresponding to the innumerable relations
and forms of connection between the facts of the world,
finding no named subjective modifications mirroring such
relations, they have for the most part denied that feelings
of relation exist, and many of them, like Hume, have gone

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 245

so far as to deny the reality of most relations out of the
mind as well as in it. Substantive psychoses, sensations
and their copies and derivatives, juxtaposed like dominoes
in a game, but really separate, everything else verbal illu
sion, — such is the upshot of this view.* The Intellectual
ists, on the other hand, unable to give up the reality of
relations extra mentem, but equally unable to point to any
distinct substantive feelings in which they were known, have
made the same admission that the feelings do not exist.
But they have drawn an opposite conclusion. The rela
tions must be known, they say, in something that is no
feeling, no mental modification continuous and consub-
stantial with the subjective tissue out of which sensations
and other substantive states are made. They are known,
these relations, by something that lies on an entirely
different plane, by an actus purus of Thought, Intellect, or
Reason, all written with capitals and considered to mean
something unutterably superior to any fact of sensibility
whatever.

But from our point of view both Intellectualists and Sen
sationalists are wrong. If there be such things as feelings
at all, then so surely as relations between objects exist in rerum
naturd, so surely, and more surely, do feelings exist to which
these relations are known. There is not a conjunction or a
preposition, and hardly an adverbial phrase, syntactic form,
or inflection of voice, in human speech, that does not express
some shading or other of relation which we at some mo
ment actually feel to exist between the larger objects of our
thought. If we speak objectively, it is the real relations
that appear revealed ; if we speak subjectively, it is the
stream of consciousness that matches each of them by an
inward coloring of its own. In either case the relations
are numberless, and no existing language is capable of do
ing justice to all their shades.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling
of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feel-

*E.g. : "The stream of thought is not a continuous current, but a series
of distinct ideas, more or less rapid in their succession ; the rapidity being
measurable by the number that pass through the mind in a given time."
(Bain : E. and W., p. 29.)

246 PSYCHOLOGY.

ing of Uue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not : so invetei\
ate lias our habit become of recognizing the existence of
the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses
to lend itself to any other use. The Empiricists have al
ways dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that
where we have a separate name, a separate thing must
needs be there to correspond with it ; and they have right
ly denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities,
principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence
than this could be brought up. But they have said noth
ing of that obverse error, of which we said a word in Chap
ter VII, (see p. 195), of supposing that where there is no name
no entity can exist. All dumb or anonymous psychic states
have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if
recognized at all, have been named after the substantive
perception they led to, as thoughts ' about ' this object or
* about ' that, the stolid word about engulfing all their del
icate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the
greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the sub
stantive parts have continually gone on.

Once more take a look at the brain. We believe the
brain to be an organ whose internal equilibrium is always
in a state of change, — the change affecting every part. The
pulses of change are doubtless more violent in one place
than in another, their rhythm more rapid at this time than
at that. As in a kaleidoscope revolving at a uniform rate, al
though the figures are always rearranging themselves, there
are instants during which the transformation seems minute
and interstitial and almost absent, followed by others when
it shoots with magical rapidity, relatively stable forms thus
alternating with forms we should not distinguish if seen
again ; so in the brain the perpetual rearrangement must
result in some forms of tension lingering relatively long,
ivhilst others simply come and pass. But if consciousness
corresponds to the fact of rearrangement itself, why, if
the rearrangement stop not, should the consciousness ever
cease ? And if a lingering rearrangement brings with it
one kind of consciousness, why should not a swift rearrange
ment bring another kind of consciousness as peculiar as
the rearrangement itself? The lingering consciousnesses,

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 247

if of simple objects, we call 'sensations' or 'images,' ac
cording as they are vivid or faint ; if of complex objects,
we call them ' percepts ' when vivid, ' concepts ' or
' thoughts ' when faint. For the swift consciousnesses we
have only those names of ' transitive states,' or ' feelings of
relation,' which we have used.* As the brain-changes

* Few writers have admitted that we cognize relations through feeling.
The intellectualists have explicitly denied the possibility of such a thing—
e.g., Prof. T. H. Green ('Mind,' vol. vn. p. 28): "No feeling, as such
or as felt, is [of ?] a relation. . . . Even a relation between feelings is not
itself a feeling or felt." On the other hand, the sensatiouists have either
smuggled in the cognition without giving any account of it, or have denied
the relations to be cognized, or even to exist, at all. A few honorable ex
ceptions, however, deserve to be named among the sensatiouists. Dcstutt
de Tracy, Laromiguiere, Cardaillac, Brown, and finally Spencer, have ex
plicitly contended for feelings of relation, COD substantial with our feelings
or thoughts of the terms ' between ' which they obtain. Thus Destutt de
Tracy says (Elements dTdeologie, T. ler, chap, iv); " The faculty of
judgment is itself a sort of sensibility, for it is the faculty of feeling the
relations among our ideas; and to feel relations is to feel." Laromiguiere
writes (Le9ons de Philosophic, lime Partie, 3me Le9ou):

" There is no one whose intelligence does not embrace simultaneously
many ideas, more or less distinct, more or less confused. Now, when we
have many ideas at once, a peculiar feeling arises in us : we feel, among
these ideas, resemblances, differences, relations. Let us call this mode of
feeling, common to us all, the feeling of relation, or relation-feeling
(sentiment-rapport). One sees immediately that these relation-feelings, re
sulting from the propinquity of ideas, must be infinitely more numerous
than the sensation-feelings (sentiments-sensations] or the feelings we have
of the action of our faculties. The slightest knowledge of the mathemat
ical theory of combinations will prove this. . . . Ideas of relation origi
nate in feelings of relation. They are the effect of our comparing them and
reasoning about them."

Similarly, de Cardaillac (Etudes Eleineutaires de Philosophic, Section I.
chap, vn ):

" By a natural consequence, we are led to suppose that at the same time
that we have several sensations or several ideas in the mind, we feel the rela
tions which exist between these sensations, and the relations which exist be
tween these ideas. ... If the feeling of relations exists in us, ... it is
necessarily the most varied and the most fertile of all human feelings:
1° the most varied, because, relations being more numerous than beings,
the feelings of relation must be in the same proportion more numerous
than the sensations whose presence gives rise to their formation; 2°, the
most fertile, for the relative ideas of which the feeling-of-relation is the
source . . . are more important than absolute ideas, if such exist. ... If
we interrogate common speech, we find the feeling of relation expressed
there in a thousand different ways. If it is easy to seize a relation, we saj;

248 PSYCHOLOGY.

are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into
each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but
one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

that it is sensible, to distinguish it from one which, because its terms are
too remote, cannot be as quickly perceived. A sensible difference, or re
semblance. . . . What is taste in the arts, in intellectual productions r
What but the feeling of those relations among the parts which constitutes
their merit ? . . . Did we not feel relations we should never attain to true
knowledge, . . . for almost all our knowledge is of relations. . . . We
never have an isolated sensation ; ... we are therefore never without the
feeling of relation. ... An object strikes our senses ; we see in it only a
sensation. . . . The relative is so near the absolute, the relation-feeling so
near the sensation- feeling, the two are so intimately fused in the composi
tion of the object, that the relation appears to us as part of the sensation
itself. It is doubtless to this sort of fusion between sensations and feelings
of relation that the silence of metaphysicians as to the latter is due; and
it is for the same reason that they have obstinately persisted in asking from
sensation alone those ideas of relation which it was powerless to give."

Dr. Thomas Brown writes (Lectures, XLV. init.): " There is an exten
sive order of our feelings which involve this notion of relation, and which
consist indeed in the mere perception of a relation of some sort. . . .
Whether the relation be of two or of many external objects, or of two or
many affections of the mind, the feeling of this relation ... is what I term
a relative suggestion; that phrase being the simplest which it is possible to
employ, for expressing, without any theory, the mere fact of the rise of
certain feelings of relation, after certain other feelings which precede
them; and therefore, as involving no particular theory, and simply ex
pressive of an undoubted fact That the feelings of relation are states

of the mind essentially different from our simple perceptions, or concep
tions of the objects, . . . that they are not what Condillac terms trans
formed sensations, I proved in a former lecture, when I combated the ex
cessive simplification of that ingenious but not very accurate philosopher.
There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, on
perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the inter
vention of any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certain
respects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility by which,
when external objects are present and have produced a certain affection of
our sensorial organ, we are instantly affected with the primary elementary
feelings of perception; and, I may add, that as our sensations or percep
tions are of various species, so are there various species of relations;— the
number of relations, indeed, even of external things, being almost infinite,
while the number of perceptions is, necessarily, limited by that of the ob
jects which have the power of producing some affection of our organs of
sensation. . . . Without that susceptibility of the mind by which it has
the feeling of relation, our consciousness would be as truly limited to a
single point, as our body would become, were it possible to fetter it to a
single atom."

Mr. Spencer is even more explicit. His philosophy is crude in that he

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 249

Feelings of Tendency.

So much for the transitive states. But there are other
unnamed states or qualities of states that are just as ini-

seems to suppose that it is only in transitive states that outward relations
are known ; whereas in truth space-relations, relations of contrast, etc. , are
felt along with their terms, in substantive states as well as in transitive
states, as we shall abundantly see. Nevertheless Mr. Spencer's passage is
so clear that it also deserves to be quoted in full (Principles of Psychology,
§ 65):

" The proximate components of Mind are of two broadly-contrasted
kinds— Feelings and the relations between feelings. Among the members
of each group there exist multitudinous unlikeuesses, many of which are
extremely strong; but such unliken esses are small compared with those
which distinguish members of the one group from members of the other.
Let us, in the first place, consider what are the characters which all Feel
ings have in common, and what are the characters which all Relations
between feelings have in common.

"Each feeling, as we here define it, is any portion of consciousness
which occupies a place sufficiently large to give it a perceivable individ
uality; which has its individuality marked off from adjacent portions of
consciousness by qualitative contrasts; and which, when introspectively
contemplated, appears to be homogeneous. These are the essentials.
Obviously if, under introspection, a state of consciousness is decomposable
into unlike parts that exist either simultaneously or successively, it is not
one feeling but two or more. Obviously if it is indistinguishable from an
adjacent portion of consciousness, it forms one with that portion — is not
an individual feeling, but part of one. And obviously if it does not
occupy in consciousness an appreciable area, or an appreciable duration, it
cannot be known as a feeling.

"A Relation between feelings is, on the contrary, characterized by
occupying no appreciable part of consciousness. Take away the terms it
unites, and it disappears along with them; having no independent place,
no individuality of its own. It is true that, under an ultimate analysis,
what we call a relation proves to be itself a kind of feeling— the momen
tary feeling accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling to
an adjacent conspicuous feeling. And it is true that, notwithstanding its
extreme brevity, its qualitative character is appreciable; for relations are
(as we shall hereafter see) distinguishable from one another only by the
unlikenesses of the feelings which accompany the momentary transitions.
Each relational feeling may, in fact, be regarded as one of those nervous
shocks which we suspect to be the units of composition of feelings; and,
though instantaneous, it is known as of greater or less strength, and as
taking place with greater or less facility. But the contrast between these
relational feelings and what we ordinarily call feelings is so strong that
we must class them apart. Their extreme brevity, their small variety, and
their dependence on the terms they unite, differentiate them in an unmis
takable way.

" Perhaps it will be well to recognize more fully the truth that this dis

250 PSYCHOLOGY.

portant and just as cognitive as they, and just as much
unrecognized by the traditional sensationalist and intellect-
ualist philosophies of mind. The first fails to find them
at all, the second finds their cognitive function, but denies
that anything in the way of feeling has a share in bringing
it about. Examples will make clear what these inarticu
late psychoses, due to waxing and waning excitements of
the brain, are like.*

Suppose three successive persons say to us: 'Wait!'
' Hark ! ' ' Look ! ' Our consciousness is thrown into

tiuction cannot be absolute. Besides admitting that, as an element of
consciousness, a relation is a momentary feeling, we must also admit that
just as a relation can have no existence apart from the feelings which form
its terms, so a feeling can exist only by relations to other feelings which
limit it in space or time or both. Strictly speaking, neither a feeling nor
a relation is an independent element of consciousness : there is throughout
a dependence such that the appreciable areas of consciousness occupied by
feelings can no more possess individualities apart from the relations which
link them, than these relations can possess individualities apart from the
feelings they link. The essential distinction between the two, then,
appears to be that whereas a relational feeling is a portion of consciousness
inseparable into parts, a feeling, ordinarily so called, is a portion of con
sciousness that admits imaginary division into like parts which are related
to one another in sequence or coexistence. A feeling proper is either
made up of like parts that occupy time, or it is made up of like parts that
occupy space, or both. In any case, a feeling proper is an aggregate of
related like parts, while a relational feeling is undecomposable. And this
is exactly the contrast between the two which must result if, as we have
inferred, feelings are composed of units of feelings, or shocks'."

* M. Paulhan (Revue Philosophique, xx. 455-6), after speaking of the
faint mental images of objects and emotions, says: " We find other vaguer
states still, upon which attention seldom rests, except in persons who by
nature or profession are addicted to internal observation. It is even diffi
cult to name them precisely, for they are little known and not classed ;
but we may cite as an example of them that peculiar impression which we
feel when, strongly preoccupied by a certain subject, we nevertheless are
engaged with, and have our attention almost completely absorbed by, mat
ters quite disconnected therewithal. We do not then exactly think of the
object of our preoccupation; we do not represent it in a clear manner; and
yet our mind is not as it would be without this preoccupation. Its object,
absent from consciousness, is nevertheless represented there by a peculiar
unmistakable impression, which often persists long and is a strong feeling,
although so obscure for our intelligence." " A mental sign of the kind is
the unfavorable disposition left in our mind towards an individual by pain-
ul incidents erewhile experienced and now perhaps forgotten. The sign
emains, but is not understood; its definite meaning is lost." (P. 458.)

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 251

three quite different attitudes of expectancy, although no
definite object is before it in any one of the three cases.
Leaving out different actual bodily attitudes, and leav
ing out the reverberating images of the three words, which
are of course diverse, probably no one will deny the exist
ence of a residual conscious affection, a sense of the direc
tion from which an impression is about to come, although
no positive impression is yet there. Meanwhile we have
no names for the psychoses in question but the names
hark, look, and wait.

Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The state
of our consciousness is peculiar. There is a gap therein ;
but no mere gap. It is a gap that is intensely active. A
sort of wraith of the name is in it, beckoning us in a given
direction, making us at moments tingle with the sense of
our closeness, and then letting us sink back without the
longed-for term. If wrong names are proposed to us, this
singularly definite gap acts immediately so as to negate
them. They do not fit into its mould. And the gap of one
word does not feel like the gap of another, all empty of
content as both might seem necessarily to be when described
as gaps. When I vainly try to recall the name of Spalding,
my consciousness is far removed from what it is when 1
vainly try to recall the name of Bowles. Here some ingen
ious persons will say : " How can the two consciousnesses
be different when the terms which might make them differ
ent are not there ? All that is there, so long as the effort
to recall is vain, is the bare effort itself. How should that
differ in the two cases ? You are making it seem to differ
by prematurely filling it out with the different names,
although these, by the hypothesis, have not yet come.
Stick to the two efforts as they are, without naming them
after facts not yet existent, and you'll be quite unable to
designate any point in which they differ." Designate, truly
enough. We can only designate the difference by borrow
ing the names of objects not yet in the mind. Which is to
say that our psychological vocabulary is wholly inadequate
to name the differences that exist, even such strong differ
ences as these. But namelessness is compatible with
existence. There are innumerable consciousnesses of

252 PSYCHOLOGY.

emptiness, no one of which taken in itself has a name,
but all different from each other. The ordinary way is to
assume that they are all emptinesses of consciousness, and
so the same state. But the feeling of an absence is toto coelo
other than the absence of a feeling. It is an intense feel
ing. The rhythm of a lost word may be there without a
sound to clothe it ; or the evanescent sense of something
which is the initial vowel or consonant may mock us fit
fully, without growing more distinct. Every one must
know the tantalizing effect of the blank rhythm of some
forgotten verse, restlessly dancing in one's mind, striving
to be filled out with words.

Again, what is the strange difference between an expe
rience tasted for the first time and the same experience
recognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before,
though we cannot name it or say where or when ? A tune,
an odor, a flavor sometimes carry this inarticulate feeling
of their familiarity so deep into our consciousness that we
are fairly shaken by its mysterious emotional power. But
strong and characteristic as this psychosis is — it probably
is due to the submaximal excitement of wide- spreading
associational brain-tracts — the only name we have for all
its shadings is ' sense of familiarity.'

When we read such phrases as ' naught but,' ' either
one or the other,' 'a is b, but,' 'although it is, neverthe
less,' ' it is an excluded middle, there is no tertium quid,'
and a host of other verbal skeletons of logical relation, is it
true that there is nothing more in our minds than the
words themselves as they pass ? What then is the mean
ing of the words which we think we understand as we read ?
What makes that meaning different in one phrase from
what it is in the other? 'Who?' 'When?' 'Where?'
Is the difference of felt meaning in these interrogatives
nothing more than their difference of sound? And is it
not (just like the difference of sound itself) known and
understood in an affection of consciousness correlative to
it, though so impalpable to direct examination ? Is not
the same true of such negatives as ' no,' ' never ' ' not

yet'?

The truth is that large tracts of human speech are noth-

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 253

ing but signs of direction in thought, of which direction we
nevertheless have an acutelj discriminative sense, though
no definite sensorial image plays any part in it whatsoever.
Sensorial images are stable psychic facts; we can hold
them still and look at them as long as we like. These bare
images of logical movement, on the contrary, are psychic
transitions, always on the wing, so to speak, and not to be
glimpsed except in flight. Their function is to lead from
one set of images to another. As they pass, we feel both
the waxing and the waning images in a way altogether
peculiar and a way quite different from the way of their
full presence. If we try to hold fast the feeling of direc
tion, the full presence comes and the feeling of direction is
lost. The blank verbal scheme of the logical movement
gives us the fleeting sense of the movement as we read it,
quite as well as does a rational sentence awakening defi
nite imaginations by its words.

What is that first instantaneous glimpse of some one's
meaning which we have, when in vulgar phrase we say we
' twig ' it ? Surely an altogether specific affection of our
mind. And has the reader never asked himself what kind
of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he
has said it ? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct
from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of
consciousness, therefore ; and yet how much of it consists of
definite sensorial images, either of words or of things?
Hardly anything ! Linger, and the words and things come
into the mind ; the anticipatory intention, the divination is
there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it
welcomes them successively and calls them right if they
agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they
do not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the most
positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without
using words that belong to the later mental facts that
replace it ? The intention to-say -so-and-so is the only name
it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our
psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective
views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. How
comes it about that a man reading something aloud for the
first time is able immediately to emphasize all his words

254 PSYCHOLOGY.

aright, unless from the very first he have a sense of at
least the form of the sentence yet to come, which sense is
fused with his consciousness of the present word, and modi
fies its emphasis in his mind so as to make him give it
the proper accent as he utters it ? Emphasis of this kind
is almost altogether a matter of grammatical construction.
If we read ( no more ' we expect presently to come upon a
1 than'; if we read ' however ' at the outset of a sentence
it is a ' yet,' a ' still,' or a ' nevertheless,' that we expect.
A noun in a certain position demands a verb in a certain
mood and number, in another position it expects a relative
pronoun. Adjectives call for nouns, verbs for adverbs,
etc., etc. And this foreboding of the coming grammatical
scheme combined with each successive uttered word is so
practically accurate that a reader incapable of understanding
four ideas of the book he is reading aloud, can nevertheless
read it with the most delicately modulated expression of
intelligence.

Some will interpret these facts by calling them all cases
in which certain images, by laws of association, awaken
others so very rapidly that we think afterwards we felt the
very tendencies of the nascent images to arise, before they were
actually there. For this school the only possible materials
of consciousness are images of a perfectly definite nature.
Tendencies exist, but they are facts for the outside psychol
ogist rather than for the subject of the observation. The
tendency is thus a psychical zero ; only its results are felt

Now what I contend for, and accumulate examples to
show, is that ' tendencies ' are not only descriptions from
without, but that they are among the objects of the stream,
which is thus aware of them from within, and must be
described as in very large measure constituted of. feelings of
tendency, often so vague that we are unable to name them
at all. It is, in short, the re-instatement of the vague to its
proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious to
press on the attention. Mr. Galton and Prof. Huxley have,
as we shall see in Chapter XVIII, made one step in advance
in exploding the ridiculous theory of Hume and Berkeley
that we can have no images but of perfectly definite things.
Another is made in the overthrow of the equally ridiculous

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 255

notion that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed
to our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not.
But these reforms are not half sweeping and radical enough.
What must be admitted is that the definite images of tra
ditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our
minds as they actually live. The traditional psychology,
talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing
but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other
moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots
all actually standing in the stream, still between them the
free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water
of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook,
Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in
the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense
of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence
it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead.
The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo
or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, — or rather that
is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone
and flesh of its flesh ; leaving it, it is true, an image of the
same thing it was before, but making it an image of that
thing newly taken and freshly understood.

What is that shadowy scheme of the ' form ' of an
opera, play, or book, which remains in our mind and on
which we pass judgment when the actual thing is done V
What is our notion of a scientific or philosophical system ?
Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes
of relation between terms, which hardly even as verbal
images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process.* We
all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our
thought is going. It is a feeling like any other, a feeling

* Mozart describes thus his manner of composing : First bits and crumbs
of the piece come and gradually join together in his mind ; then the soul
getting warmed to the work, the thing grows more and more, " and I
spread it out broader and clearer, and at last it gets almost finished in my
head, even when it is a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a
single glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a handsome
human being ; in which way I do not hear it in my imagination at all as
a succession — the way it must come later — but all at once, as it were. ](
is a rare feast ! All the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beau
tiful strong dream. But the best of all is the hearing of it all at once,''

256 PSYCHOLOGY

of what thoughts are next to arise, before they have arisen.
This field of view of consciousness varies very much in
extent, depending largely on the degree of mental freshness
or fatigue. When very fresh, our minds carry an immense
horizon with them. The present image shoots its perspec
tive far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which
lie the thoughts as yet unborn. Under ordinary conditions
the halo of felt relations is much more circumscribed. And
in states of extreme brain-fag the horizon is narrowed
almost to the passing word, — the associative machinery,
however, providing for the next word turning up in orderly
sequence, until at last the tired thinker is led to some kind
of a conclusion. At certain moments he may find himself
doubting whether his thoughts have not come to a full stop ;
but the vague sense of a plus ultra makes him ever struggle
on towards a more definite expression of what it may be ;
whilst the slowness of his utterance shows how difficult,
under such conditions, the labor of thinking must be.

The awareness that our definite thought has come to a
stop is an entirely different thing from the awareness that
our thought is definitively completed. The expression of
the latter state of mind is the falling inflection which be
tokens that the sentence is ended, and silence. The ex
pression of the former state is ' hemming and hawing,' or
else such phrases as ' et cetera,' or 'and so forth.' But
notice that every part of the sentence to be left incomplete
feels differently as it passes, by reason of the premonition
we have that we shall be unable to end it. The ' and so
forth ' casts its shadow back, and is as integral a part of
the object of the thought as the distinctest of images
would be.

Again, when we use a common noun, such as man, in a
universal sense, as signifying all possible men, we are fully
aware of this intention on our part, and distinguish it care
fully from our intention when we mean a certain group of
men, or a solitary individual before us. In the chapter on
Conception we shall see how important this difference of
intention is. It casts its influence over the whole of the
sentence, both before and after the spot in which the word
man is used.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 257

Nothing is easier than to symbolize all these facts in
terms of brain-action. Just as the echo of the whence-, the
sense of the starting point of our thought, is probably
due to the dying excitement of processes but a moment
since vividly aroused ; so the sense of the whither, the fore
taste of the terminus, must be due to the waxing excite
ment of tracts or processes which, a moment hence, will be
the cerebral correlatives of some thing which a moment
hence will be vividly present to the thought. Represented
by a curve, the neurosis underlying consciousness must at
any moment be like this :

FIG 27.

Each point of the horizontal line stands for some
brain-tract or process. The height of the curve above
the line stands for the intensity of the process. All the
processes are present, in the intensities shown by the
curve. But those before the latter's apex ivere more in
tense a moment ago ; those after it iviU be more intense a
moment hence. If I recite a, b, c, d, e,f, g, at the moment
of uttering c?, neither a, b, c, nor e, /, g, are out of my
consciousness altogether, but both, after their respective
fashions, ' mix their dim lights ' with the stronger one of
the d, because their neuroses are both awake in some
degree.

There is a common class of mistakes which shows how
brain-processes begin to be excited before the thoughts
attached to them are due — due, that is, in substantive and
vivid form. I mean those mistakes of speech or writing
by which, in Dr. Carpenter's words, " we mispronounce or
misspell a word, by introducing into it a letter or syllable
of some other, whose turn is shortly to come ; or, it may be,
the whole of the anticipated word is substituted for the one

258 PSYCHOLOGY

which ought to have been expressed."* In these cases
one of two things must have happened: either some local
accident of nutrition blocks the process that is due, so that
other processes discharge that ought as yet to be but nas-
cently aroused; or some opposite local accident furthers
the latter processes and makes them explode before their
time. In the chapter on Association of Ideas, numerous
instances will come before us of the actual effect on con
sciousness of neuroses not yet maximally aroused.

It is just like the ' overtones ' in music. Different in.
struments give the ' same note,' but each in a different
voice, because each gives more than that note, namely, vari
ous upper harmonics of it which differ from one instrument
to another. They are not separately heard by the ear ;
they blend with the fundamental note, and suffuse it, and
alter it ; and even so do the waxing and waning brain-
processes at every moment blend with and suffuse and alter
the psychic effect of the processes which are at their cul
minating point.

Let us use the words psychic overtone, suffusion, or fringe,
to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our
thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but
dimly perceived. f

If we then consider the cognitive function of different

* Mental Physiology, § 236. Dr. Carpenter's explanation differs materi
ally from that given in the text.

f Cf. also S. Strieker : Vorlesungen tlber allg. u. exp. Pathologic (1879),
pp. 462-3, 501, 547; Romanes: Origin of Human Faculty, p. 82. It is so
hard to make one's self clear that I may advert to a misunderstanding of
my views by the late Prof. Thos. Maguire of Dublin (Lectures on Philoso
phy, 1885). This author considers that by the ' fringe ' I mean some sort
-»f psychic material by which sensations in themselves separate are made
to cohere together, and wittily says that I ought to " see that uniting sensa
tions by their ' fringes ' is more vague than to construct the universe out
of oysters by platting their beards " (p. 211). But the fringe, as I use the
word, means nothing like this ; it is part of the object cognized,— substantive
Dualities and things appearing to the mind in & fringe of relations. Some parts
—the transitive parts— of our stream of thought cognize the relations rather
than the things ; but both the transitive and the substantive parts form one
continuous stream, with no discrete ' sensations ' in it such as Prof. MK
guire supposes, and supposes ip,e to suppose, to be their

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 259

states of mind, we may feel assured that the difference be
tween those that are mere * acquaintance,' and those that
are ' knowledges-a&ow£ ' (see p. 221) is reducible almost
entirely to the absence or presence of psychic fringes or
overtones. Knowledge about a thing is knowledge of its
relations. Acquaintance with it is limitation to the bare
impression which it makes. Of most of its relations we are
only aware in the penumbral nascent way of a ' fringe ' of
unarticulated affinities about it. And, before passing to the
next topic in order, I must say a little of this sense of
affinity, as itself one of the most interesting features of the
subjective stream.

In all our voluntary thinking there is some topic or
subject about which all the members of the thought revolve.
Half the time this topic is a problem, a gap we cannot
yet fill with a definite picture, word, or phrase, but which, in
the manner described some time back, influences us in an
intensely active and determinate psychic way. Whatever
may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we feel
their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our
thoughts' destiny. Some bring us nearer to that consum
mation. Some the gap negates as quite irrelevant. Each
swims in a felt fringe of relations of which the aforesaid
gap is the term. Or instead of a definite gap we may
merely carry a mood of interest about with us. Then,
however vague the mood, it will still act in the same way,
throwing a mantle of felt affinity over such representa
tions, entering the mind, as suit it, and tingeing with the
feeling of tediousness or discord all those with which it
has no concern.

Relation, then, to our topic or interest is constantly felt
in the fringe, and particularly the relation of harmony and
discord, of furtherance or hindrance of the topic. When
the sense of furtherance is there, we are ' all right ; ' with
the sense of hindrance we are dissatisfied and perplexed,
and cast about us for other thoughts. Now any thought
the quality of whose fringe lets us feel ourselves 'all right,'
is an acceptable member of our thinking, whatever kind of
thought it may otherwise be. Provided we only feel it
to have a place in the scheme of relations in which the in-

260 PSYCHOLOGY.

teresting topic also lies, that is quite sufficient to make of
it a relevant and appropriate portion of our train of ideas.

For the important thing about a train of thought is its
conclusion. That is the meaning, or, as we say, the topic of
the thought. That is what abides when all its other mem
bers have faded from memory. Usually this conclusion is
a word or phrase or particular image, or practical attitude
or resolve, whether rising to answer a problem or fill a
pre-existing gap that worried us, or whether accidentally
stumbled on in revery. In either case it stands out from
the other segments of the stream by reason of the peculiar
interest attaching to it. This interest arrests it, makes a
sort of crisis of it when it comes, induces attention upon it
and makes us treat it in a substantive way.

The parts of the stream that precede these substantive
conclusions are but the means of the latter's attainment.
And, provided the same conclusion be reached, the means
may be as mutable as we like, for the ' meaning ' of the stream
of thought will be the same. What difference does it make
what the means are ? " Qu'importe le flacon, pourvu qu'on
ait I'ivresse?" The relative unimportance of the means
appears from the fact that when the conclusion is there, we
have always forgotten most of the steps preceding its attain
ment. When we have uttered a proposition, we are rarely
able a moment afterwards to recall our exact words, though
we can express it in different words easily enough. The
practical upshot of a book we read remains with us, though
we may not recall one of its sentences.

The only paradox would seem to lie in supposing that
the fringe of felt affinity and discord can be the same in
two heterogeneous sets of images. Take a train of words
passing through the mind and leading to a certain conclu
sion on the one hand, and on the other hand an almost
wordless set of tactile, visual and other fancies leading to
the same conclusion. Can the halo, fringe, or scheme in
which we feel the words to lie be the same as that in which
we feel the images to lie ? Does not the discrepancy of
terms involve a discrepancy of felt relations among them ?

If the terms be taken qua mere sensations, it assur
edly does. For instance, the words may rhyme with each

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 261

other, — the visual images can have no such affinity as that.
But qua thoughts, qua sensations understood, the words have
contracted by long association fringes of mutual repugnance
or affinity with each other and with the conclusion, which
run exactly parallel with like fringes in the visual, tactile
and other ideas. The most important element of these
fringes is, I repeat, the mere feeling of harmony or discord,
of a right or wrong direction in the thought. Dr. Camp
bell has, so far as I know, made the best analysis of this
fact, and his words, often quoted, deserve to be quoted again.
The chapter is entitled "What is the cause that nonsense
so often escapes being detected, both by the writer and by
the reader ?" The author, in answering this question, makes
(inter alia) the following remarks : *

"That connection [he says] or relation which comes gradually to sub
sist among the different words of a language, in the minds of those who
speak it, ... is merely consequent on this, that those words are
employed as signs of connected or related things. It is an axiom in
geometry that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.
It may, in like manner, be admitted as an axiom in psychology that
ideas associated by the same idea will associate one another. Hence it
will happen that if, from experiencing the connection of two things,
there results, as infallibly there will result, an association between the
ideas or notions annexed to them, as each idea will moreover be asso
ciated by its sign, there will likewise be an association between the ideas
of the signs. Hence the sounds considered as signs will be conceived to
have a connection analogous to that which subsisteth among the things
signified; I say, the sounds considered as signs; for this way of consid
ering them constantly attends us in speaking, writing, hearing, and
reading. When we purposely abstract from it, and regard them merely
as sounds, we are instantly sensible that they are quite unconnected, and
have no other relation than what ariseth from similitude of tone or
accent. But to consider them in this manner commonly results from
previous design, and requires a kind of effort which is not exerted in the
ordinary use of speech. In ordinary use they are regarded solely as
signs, or, rather, they are confounded with the things they signify; the
consequence of which is that, in the manner just now explained, we come
insensibly to conceive a connection among them of a very different sort
from that of which sounds are naturally susceptible.

"Now this conception, habit, or tendency of the mind, call it which
you please, is considerably strengthened by the frequent use of language
and by the structure of it. Language is the sole channel through which

* George Campbell: Philosophy of Rhetoric, book n. chap. vii.

262 PSYCHOLOGY.

we communicate our knowledge and discoveries to others, and through
which the knowledge and discoveries of others are communicated to us.
By reiterated recourse to this medium, it necessarily happens that
when things are related to each other, the words signifying those
things are more commonly brought together in discourse. Hence the
words and names by themselves, by customary vicinity, contract in the
fancy a relation additional to that which they derive purely from being
the symbols of related things. Farther, this tendency is strengthened
by the structure of language. All languages whatever, even the most
barbarous, as far as hath yet appeared, are of a regular and analogical
make. The consequence is that similar relations in things will be ex
pressed similarly ; that is, by similar inflections, derivations, composi
tions, arrangement of words, or juxtaposition of particles, according to
the genius or grammatical form of the particular tongue. Now as, by
the habitual use of a language (even though it were quite irregular),
the signs would insensibly become connected in the imagination wher
ever the things signified are connected in nature, so, by the regular
structure of a language, this connection among the signs is conceived
as analogous to that which subsisteth among their archetypes."

If we know English and French and begin a sentence in
French, all the later words that come are French ; we hardly
ever drop into English. And this affinity of the French
words for each other is not something merely operating me
chanically as a brain-law, it is something we feel at the time.
Our understanding of a French sentence heard never falls
to so low an ebb that we are not aware that the words lin
guistically belong together. Our attention can hardly so
wander that if an English word be suddenly introduced we
shall not start at the change. Such a vague sense as this
of the words belonging together is the very minimum of
fringe that can accompany them, if 'thought' at all.
Usually the vague perception that all the words we hear
belong to the same language and to the same special vocab
ulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence
is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that
what we hear is sense. But if an unusual foreign word
be introduced, if the grammar trip, or if a term from an
incongruous vocabulary suddenly appear, such as ' rat-
trap ' or * plumber's bill ' in a philosophical discourse, the
sentence detonates, as it were, we receive a shock from the
incongruity, and the drowsy assent is gone. The feeling of
Tationality in these cases seems rather a negative than a

THE STREAM QF THOUGHT. 263

positive thing, being the mere absence of shock, or sense
of discord, between the terms of thought.

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the
mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together
that the slightest misreading, such as ' casualty ' for
'causality,' or 'perpetual' for * perceptual,' will be cor
rected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he
gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary,
and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with
absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and
pass unchallenged. Discourses at prayer-meetings, re
shuffling the same collection of cant phrases, and the whole
genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-reporter's
flourishes give illustrations of this. "The birds filled the
tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist,
cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once
in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It
was probably written unconsciously by the hurried re
porter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire
volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston* is com
posed of stuff like this passage picked out at random :

" The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their out
lets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the
nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage
up to the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmos-
phered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes,— those
sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, — they
descend, and become assimilated by the afferents of the nuclear organ
ism, "t

* Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, by ' Jean Story' (1879).

fM. G. Tarde, quoting (in Delbnmf, Le Sommeil et les Revcs (1885), p.
<J26) some nonsense-verses from a dream, says they show how prosodic
forms may subsist in a mind from which logical rules are effaced. . . .
I was able, in dreaming, to preserve the faculty of rinding two words which
rhymed, to appreciate the rhyme, to fill up the verse as it first presented
itself with other words which, added, gave the right number of syllables,
and yet I was ignorant of the sense of the words. . . . Thus we have the
extraordinary fact that the words called each other up, without calling up
their sense. . . . Even when awake, it is more difficult to ascend to the
meaning of a word than to pass from one word to another ; or to put it
otherwise, it is harder to be a thinker than to be a rhetorician, and on the
whole nothing is commoner thon trains of -words not understood."

264 PSYCHOLOGY.

There are every year works published whose contents
show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the
book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to
end. It is impossible to divine, in such a case, just what
sort of feeling of rational relation between the words may
have appeared to the author's mind. The border line
between objective sense and nonsense is hard to draw ;
that between subjective sense and nonsense, impossible.
Subjectively, any collocation of words may make sense —
even the wildest words in a dream — if one only does not
doubt their belonging together. Take the obscurer pas
sages in Hegel : it is a fair question whether the rationality
included in them be anything more than the fact that the
words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung
together on a scheme of predication and relation, — imme
diacy, self-relation, and what not, — which has habitually
recurred. Yet there seems no reason to doubt that the
subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was
strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some
readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

To sum up, certain kinds of verbal associate, certain
grammatical expectations fulfilled, stand for a good part ol
our impression that a sentence has a meaning and is
dominated by the Unity of one Thought. Nonsense in
grammatical form sounds half rational ; sense with gram
matical sequence upset sounds nonsensical ; e.g., " Elba the
Napoleon English faith had banished broken to he Saint
because Helena at." Finally, there is about each word the
psychic ' overtone ' of feeling that it brings us nearer to a
forefelt conclusion. Suffuse all the words of a sentence,
as they pass, with these three fringes or haloes of relation,
let the conclusion seem worth arriving at, and all will
admit the sentence to be an expression of thoroughly
continuous, unified, and rational thought.*

* We think it odd that young children should listen with such rapt
attention to the reading of stories expressed in words half of which they
do not understand, and of none of which they ask the meaning. But
their thinking is in form just what ours is when it is rapid. Both of us
make flying leaps over large portions of the sentences uttered and we give

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 265

Each word, in such a sentence, is felt, not only as a
word, but as having a meaning. The ' meaning ' of a word
taken thus dynamically in a sentence may be quite differ
ent from its meaning when taken statically or without con
text. The dynamic meaning is usually reduced to the bare
fringe we have described, of felt suitability or unfitness to
the context and conclusion. The static meaning, when the
word is concrete, as ' table,' ' Boston,' consists of sensory
images awakened ; when it is abstract, as ' criminal legisla
tion,' ' fallacy,' the meaning consists of other words aroused,
forming the so-called ' definition.'

Hegel's celebrated dictum that pure being is identical
with pure nothing results from his taking the words stati
cally, or without the fringe they wear in a context. Taken
in isolation, they agree in the single point of awakening no
sensorial images. But taken dynamically, or as significant,
— as thought, — their fringes of relation, their affinities and
repugnances, their function and meaning, are felt and
understood to be absolutely opposed.

Such considerations as these remove all appearance of
paradox from those cases of extremely deficient visual im
agery of whose existence Mr. Galton has made us aware (see
below). An exceptionally intelligent friend informs me that
he can frame no image whatever of the appearance of his
breakfast-table. When asked how he then remembers it at
all, he says he simple ' knows ' that it seated four people, and
was covered with a white cloth on which were a butter
dish, a coffee-pot, radishes, and so forth. The mind-stuff
of which this ' knowing' is made seems to be verbal images
exclusively. But if the words ' coffee,' ' bacon,' * muffins,'
and ' eggs ' lead a man to speak to his cook, to pay his
bills, and to take measures for the morrow's meal exactly as
visual and gustatory memories would, why are they not,

attention only to substantive starting points, turning points, and conclu
sions here and there. All the rest, ' substantive ' and separately intelligible,
as it may potentially be, actually serves only as so much transitive material.
It is internodal consciousness, giving us the sense of continuity, but having
no significance apart from its mere gap-filling function. The children
probably feel no gap when through a lot of unintelligible words they arc
swiftly carried to a familiar and intelligible terminus.

266 PSYCHOLOGY.

for all practical intents and purposes, as good a kind of
material in which to think ? In fact, we may suspect them
to be for most purposes better than terms with a richer
imaginative coloring. The scheme of relationship and the
conclusion being the essential things in thinking, that kind
of mind-stuff which is handiest will be the best for the
purpose. Now words, uttered or unexpressed, are the
handiest mental elements we have. Not only are they very
rapidly revivable, but they are revivable as actual sen
sations more easily than any other items of our ex
perience. Did they not possess some such advantage as
this, it would hardly be the case that the older men are and
the more effective as thinkers, the more, as a rule, they
have lost their visualizing power and depend on words.
This was ascertained by Mr. Galton to be the case with
members of the Royal Society. The present writer ob
serves it in his own person most distinctly.

On the other hand, a deaf and dumb man can weave
his tactile and visual images into a system of thought quite
as effective and rational as that of a word-user. The
question whether thought is possible without language has
been a favorite topic of discussion among philosophers.
Some interesting reminiscences of his childhood by Mr.
Ballard, a deaf-mute instructor in the National College at
Washington, show it to be perfectly possible. A few
paragraphs may be quoted here.

" In consequence of the loss of my hearing in infancy, I was de
barred from enjoying the advantages which children in the full pos
session of their senses derive from the exercises of the common primary
school, from the every-day talk of their school-fellows and playmates,
and from the conversation of their parents and other grown-up persons.

" I could convey my thoughts and feelings to my parents and
brothers by natural signs or pantomime, and I could understand what
they said to me by the same medium; our intercourse being, however,
confined to the daily routine of home affairs and hardly going beyond
the cirele of my own observation. . . .

"My father adopted a course which he thought would, in some
measure, compensate me for the loss of my hearing. It was that of
taking me with him when business required him to ride abroad ; and
he took me more frequently than he did my brothers ; giving, as the
reason for his apparent partiality, that they could acquire information

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 267

through the ear, while I depended solely upon my eye for acquaintance
with affairs of the outside world. . . .

' ' I have a vivid recollection of the delight I felt in watching the
different scenes we passed through, observing the various phases of
nature, both animate and inanimate ; though we did not, owing to my
infirmity, engage in conversation. It was during those delightful rides,
some two or three years before my initiation into the rudiments of
written language, that I began to ask myself the question : How came
the world into being ? When this question occurred to my mind, I set
myself to thinking it over a long time. My curiosity was awakened as
to what was the origin of human life in its first appearance upon the
earth, and of vegetable life as well, and also the cause of the existence
of the earth, sun, moon, and stars.

" I remember at one time when my eye fell upon a very large old
stump which we happened to pass in one of our rides, I asked myself,
' Is it possible that the first man that ever came into the world rose out
of that stump ? But that stump is only a remnant of a once noble mag
nificent tree, and how came that tree ? Why, it came only by beginning
to grow out of the ground just like those little trees now coming up.'
And I dismissed from my mind, as an absurd idea, the connection
between the origin of man and a decaying old stump. . . .

" I have no recollection of what it was that first suggested to me the
question as to the origin of things. I had before this time gained ideas
of the descent from parent to child, of the propagation of animals, arid
of the production of plants from seeds. The question that occurred to
my mind was : whence came the first man, the first animal, and the
first plant, at the remotest distance of time, before which there was no
man, no animal, no plant ; since I knew they all had a beginning and
an end.

"It is impossible to state the exact order in which these different
questions arose, i.e., about men, animals, plants, the earth, sun, moon,
etc. The lower animals did not receive so much thought as was bestowed
upon man and the earth ; perhaps because I put man and beast in the
same class, since I believed that man would be annihilated and there was
no resurrection beyond the grave, — though I am told by my mother that,
in answer to my question, in the case of a deceased uncle who looked
to me like a person in sleep, she had tried to make me understand that
he would awake in the far future. It was my belief that man and
beast derived their being from the same source, and were to be laid
down in the dust in a state of annihilation. Considering the brute
animal as of secondary importance, and allied to man on a lower level,
man and the earth were the two things on which my mind dwelled
most.

" I think I was five years old, when I began to understand the de
scent from parent to child and the propagation of animals. I was
nearly eleven years old, when I entered the Institution where I was ed-

268 PSYCHOLOGY.

ucated ; and I remember distinctly that it was at least two years before
this time that I began to ask myself the question as to the origin of the
universe. My age was then about eight, not over nine years.

"Of the form of the earth, I had no idea in my childhood, except
that, from a look at a map of the hemispheres, I inferred there were
two immense disks of matter lying near each other. I also believed the
sun and moon to be round, flat plates of illuminating matter ; and for-
those luminaries I entertained a sort of reverence on account of their
power of lighting and heating the earth. I thought from their coming
up and going down, travelling across the sky in so regular a manner
that there must be a certain something having power to govern their
course. I believed the sun went into a hole at the west and came out
of another at the east, travelling through a great tube in the earth, de
scribing the same curve as it seemed to describe in the sky. The stars
seemed to me to be tiny lights studded in the sky.

" The source from which the universe came was the question about
which my mind revolved in a vain struggle to grasp it, or rather to
fight the way up to attain to a satisfactory answer. When I had occupied
myself with this subject a considerable time, I perceived that it was a
matter much greater than my mind could comprehend ; and I remem
ber well that I became so appalled at its mystery and so bewildered at
my inability to grapple with it that I laid the subject aside and out of
my mind, glad to escape being, as it were, drawn into a vortex of inex
tricable confusion. Though I felt relieved at this escape, yet I could not
resist the desire to know the truth ; and I returned to the subject ; but
as before, I left it, after thinking it over for some time. In this state of
perplexity, I hoped all the time to get at the truth, still believing that
the more I gave thought to the subject, the more my mind would pene
trate the mystery. Thus I was tossed like a shuttlecock, returning to
the subject and recoiling from it, till I came to school.

" I remember that my mother once told me about a being up above,
pointing her finger towards the sky and with a solemn look on her coun
tenance. I do not recall the circumstance which led to this communica
tion. When she mentioned the mysterious being up in the sky, I was
eager to take hold of the subject, and plied her with questions concern
ing the form and appearance of this unknown being, asking if it was
the sun, moon, or one of the stars. I knew she meant that there was a
living one somewhere up in the sky ; but when I realized that she could
not answer my questions, I gave it up in despair, feeling sorrowful that
I could not obtain a definite idea of the mysterious living one up in the
sky.

' ' One day, while we were haying in a field, there was a series of heavy
thunder-claps. I asked one of my brothers where they came from. He
pointed to the sky and made a zigzag motion with his finger, signifying
lightning. I imagined there was a great man somewhere in the blue
vault, who made a loud noise with his voice out of it ; and each time I

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 269

heard * a thunder-clap I was frightened, and looked up at the sky, fear
ing he was speaking a threatening word." t

Here we may pause. The reader sees by this time that
it makes little or no difference in what sort of mind- stuff, in
what quality of imagery, his thinking goes on. The only
images intrinsically important are the halting-places, the
substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought.
Throughout all the rest of the stream, the feelings of rela
tion are everything, and the terms related almost naught.
These feelings of relation, these psychic overtones, halos,
suffusions, or fringes about the terms, may be the same
in very different systems of imagery. A diagram may help
to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where
the end is the same. Let A be some experience from
which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical
conclusion rationally inferrible from it. One gets to the
conclusion by one line, another by another ; one follows a
course of English, another of
German, verbal imagery.
"With one, visual images pre
dominate ; with another, tac
tile. Some trains are tinged
with emotions, others not;
some are very abridged, syn
thetic and rapid, others, hesi- FIG. 28.
tating and broken into many steps. But when the penul
timate terms of all the trains, however differing inter sc,
finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say and rightly
say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same
thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond

* Not literally heard, of course. Deaf mutes are quick to perceive
shocks and jars that can be felt, even when so slight as to be unnoticed by
those who can hear.

t Quoted by Samuel Porter : 'Is Thought possible without Language?'
in Princeton Review, 57th year, pp. 108-12 (Jan. 1881 ?). Of. also W. W.
Ireland : The Blot upon the Brain (1886), Paper X, part IT ; G. J. Romanes :
Mental Evolution in Man, pp. 81-83, and references therein made. Prof.
Max Miiller gives a very complete history of this controversy in pp. 30 -64 of
his ' Science of Thought ' (1887). His own view is that Thought and Speech
are inseparable ; but under speech he includes any conceivable sort of sym
bolism or even mental imagery, and he makes no allowance for the word
less summary glimpses which we have of systems of relation and direction.

270 PSYCHOLOGY.

measure to be let ato his neighbor's mind and to find now
different the scene y there was from that in his own.

Thought is in fact a kind of Algebra, as Berkeley long ago
said, "in which, though a particular quantity be marked by
each letter, yet to proceed right, it is not requisite that in
every step each letter suggest to your thoughts that par
ticular quantity it was appointed to stand for." Mr. Lewes
has developed this algebra-analogy so well that I must
quote his words :

" The leading characteristic of algebra is that of operation on rela
tions. This also is the leading characteristic of Thought. Algebra can
not exist without values, nor Thought without Feelings. The operations
are so many blank forms till the values are assigned. Words are va
cant sounds, ideas are blank forms, unless they symbolize images and
sensations which are their values. Nevertheless it is rigorously true,
and of the greatest importance, that analysts carry on very extensive
operations with blank forms, never pausing to supply the symbols with
values until the calculation is completed; and ordinary men, no less
than philosophers, carry on long trains of thought without pausing to
translate their ideas (words) into images. . . , Suppose some one from
a distance shouts 'a lion!' At once the maii starts in alarm. . . .
To the man the word is not only an ... expression of all that he has
seen and heard of lions, capable of recalling various experiences, but is
also capable of taking its place in a connected series of thoughts without
recalling any of those experiences, without reviving an image, however
faint, of the lion— simply as a sign of a certain relation Included in the
complex so named. Like an algebraic symbol it may be operated on
without conveying other significance than an abstract relation : it is a
sign of Danger, related to fear with all its motor sequences. Its logical
position suffices. . . . Ideas are substitutions which require a secondary
process when what is symbolized by them is translated into the images
and experiences it replaces; and this secondary process is frequently not
performed at all, generally only performed to a very small extent. Let
anyone closely examine what has passed in his mind when he has con
structed a chain of reasoning, and he will be surprised at the fewness
and faintness of the images which have accompanied the ideas. Sup
pose you inform me that ' the blood rushed violently from the man's
heart, quickening his pulse at the sight of his enemy.' Of the many la
tent images in this phrase, how many were salient in your mind and in
mine ? Probably two — the man and his enemy— and these images were
faint. Images of blood, heart, violent rushing, pulse, quickening, and
sight, were either not revived at all, or were passing shadows. Had
any such images arisen, they would have hampered thought, retarding
the logical process of judgment by irrelevant connections. The symbols
had substituted relations for these values. . . . There are no images of

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 271

two things and three things, when I say ' two and three equal five;'
there are simply familiar symbols having precise relations. . . . The
verbal symbol ' horse,' which stands for all our experiences of horses,
serves all the purposes of Thought, without recalling one of the images
clustered in the perception of horses, just as the sight of a horse's form
serves all the purposes of recognition without recalling the sound of its
neighing or its tramp, its qualities as an animal of draught, and so
forth.*

It need only be added that as the Algebrist, though the
sequence of his terms is fixed by their relations rather than
by their several values, must give a real value to the final one
he reaches ; so the thinker in words must let his conclud
ing word or phrase be translated into its full sensible-image-
value, under penalty of the thought being left unrealized
and pale.

This is all I have to say about the sensible continuity
and unity of our thought as contrasted with the apparent
discreteness of the words, images, and other means by
which it seems to be carried on. Between all their sub
stantive elements there is ' transitive ' consciousness, and
the words and images are ' fringed,' and not as discrete as
to a careless view they seem. Let us advance now to the
next head in our description of Thought's stream.

4. Human thought appears to deal with objects independent
of itself ; that ix, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of
knowing.

For Absolute Idealism, the infinite Thought and its ob
jects are one. The Objects are, through being thought ;
the eternal Mind is, through thinking them. Were a
human thought alone in the world there would be no
reason for any other assumption regarding it. Whatever
it might have before it would be its vision, would be there,
in its ' there,' or then, in its ' then ' ; and the question would
never arise whether an extra-mental duplicate of it existed or
not. The reason why we all believe that the objects of our
thoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that there
are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as

* Problems of Life and Mind, 3d Series, Problem iv, chapter 5. Com
pare also Victor Eggur : Lu Parole luterieure (Paris, 1881), chap. vi.

272 PSYCHOLOGY.

we cannot help supposing. The judgment that my thought
has the same object as his thought is what makes the
psychologist call my thought cognitive of an outer reality.
The judgment that my own past thought and my own pres
ent thought are of the same object is what makes me take
the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangu-
lation into an independent position, from which it may
appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective
appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities
outside of thought.* In Chapter XII we shall have to take
up the judgment of sameness again.

To show that the question of reality being extra-mental
or not is not likely to arise in the absence of repeated ex
periences of the same, take the example of an altogether
unprecedented experience, such as a new taste in the throat.
Is it a subjective qiiality of feeling, or an objective quality
felt ? You do not even ask the question at this point. It
is simply that taste. But if a doctor hears you describe it,
and says : " Ha ! Now you know what heartburn is," then
it becomes a quality already existent extra mentem tuam,
which you in turn have come upon and learned. The first
spaces, times, things, qualities, experienced by the child
probably appear, like the first heartburn, in this absolute
way, as simple beings, neither in nor out of thought. But
later, by having other thoughts than this present one, and
making repeated judgments of sameness among their ob
jects, he corroborates in himself the notion of realities,
past and distant as well as present, which realities no one
single thought either possesses or engenders, but which all
may contemplate and know. This, as was stated in the last
chapter, is the psychological point of view, the relatively
uncritical non-idealistic point of view of all natural science,
beyond which this book cannot go. A mind which has
become conscious of its own cognitive function, plays what
we have called ' the psychologist ' upon itself. It not only
knows the things that appear before it ; it knows that it

*If but one person sees an apparition we consider it his private halluci
nation. If more than one. we begin to think it may be a real external
presence.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 27?

knows them. This stage of reflective condition is, more 01
less explicitly, our habitual adult state of mind.

It cannot, however, be regarded as primitive. The con
sciousness of objects must come first. We seem to lapse
into this primordial condition when consciousness is re
duced to a minimum by the inhalation of anaesthetics or
during a faint. Many persons testify that at a certain stage
of the anaesthetic process objects are still cognized whilst
the thought of self is lost. Professor Herzeu says : *

" During the syncope there is absolute psychic annihilation, the ab
sence of all consciousness ; then at the beginning of coming to, one has
at a certain moment a vague, limitless, infinite feeling— a sense of exist
ence in general without the least trace of distinction between the me and
the not-me."

Dr. Shoemaker of Philadelphia describes during the
deepest conscious stage of ether-intoxication a vision of
" two endless parallel lines in swift longitudinal motion . . . on a uni
form misty background . . . together with a constant sound or whirr,
not loud but distinct . . . which seemed to be connected with the paral
lel lines. . . . These phenomena occupied the whole field. There were
present no dreams or visions in any way connected with human affairs,
no ideas or impressions akin to anything in past experience, no emo
tions, of course no idea of personality. There was no conception as to
what being it was that was regarding the two lines, or that there existed
any such thing as such a being ; the lines and waves were all." t

Similarly a friend of Mr. Herbert Spencer, quoted by
him in 'Mind' (vol in. p. 556), speaks of " an undisturbed
empty quiet everywhere except that a stupid presence lay
like a heavy intrusion somewhere — a blotch on the calm."
This sense of objectivity and lapse of subjectivity, even
when the object is almost indefinable, is, it seems to me, a
somewhat familiar phase in chloroformization, though in
my own case it is too deep a phase for any articulate after-
memory to remain. I only know that as it vanishes I
seem to wake to a sense of my own existence as something
additional to what had previously been there.J

* Revue Philosophique, vol. xxi. p. 671.

f Quoted from the Therapeutic Gazette, by the N. Y. Semi-weekly
Evening Post for Nov. 2, 1886.

Jin lialf-stunned states self -consciousness may lapse. A frieud writes
me : " We were driving back from in a wagonette. The door flew

274 PSYCHOLOGY.

Many philosophers, however, hold that the reflective
consciousness of the self is essential to the cognitive func
tion of thought. They hold that a thought, in order to know
a thing at all, must expressly distinguish between the thing
and its own self.* This is a perfectly wanton assumption,
and not the faintest shadow of reason exists for supposing
it true. As well might I contend that I cannot dream
without dreaming that I dream, swear without swearing
that I swear, deny without denying that I deny, as main
tain that I cannot know without knowing that I know. 1
may have either acquaintance-with, or knowledge-about,
an object O without think about myself at all. It suffices
for this that I think O, and that it exist. If, in addition
to thinking O, I also think that I exist and that I know O,
well and good ; I then know one more thing, a fact about O,
of which I previously was unmindful. That, however, does
not prevent me from having already known O a good deal.
O per se, or O plus P, are as good objects of knowledge as
O plus me is. The philosophers in question simply substi
tute one particular object for all others, and call it the ob
ject par excellence. It is a case of the psychologist's fal
lacy ' (see p. 197). They know the object to be one thing

open and X., alias ' Baldy,' fell out on the road. We pulled up at once,
and then he said, ' Did anybody fall out?' or 'Who fell out?'— I don't
exactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out, he said, ' Did
Baldy fall out ? Poor Baldy ! " '

* Kant originated this view. I subjoin a few English statements of it.
J. Ferrier, Institutes of Metaphysic, Proposition i : " Along with what
ever any intelligence knows it must, as the ground or condition of its
knowledge, have some knowledge of itself." Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discus-
sions, p. 47: " We know, and we know that we know,— these propositions,
logically distinct, are really identical ; each implies the other. ... So true
is the scholastic brocard : non sentimus nisi sentiamus nos sentire." H. L.
Mansel, Metaphysics, p. 58: "Whatever variety of materials may exist
within reach of my mind, I can become conscious of them only by recog
nizing them as mine. . . . Relation to the conscious self is thus the perma
nent and universal feature which every state of consciousness as such must
exhibit." T. H. Green, Introduction to Hume, p. 12: "A consciousness
by the man ... of himself, in negative relation to the thing that is his
object, and this consciousness must be taken to go along with the percep
tive act itself. Not less than this indeed can be involved in any act that is
to be the beginning of knowledge at all. It is the minimum of possible
thought or intelligence."

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 275

and the thought another; and they forthwith foist their
own knowledge into that of the thought of which they pre
tend to give a true account. To conclude, then, thought may,
but need not, in knoiving, discriminate between its object and
itself.

We have been using the word Object. Something must
now be said about the proper use of the term Object in Psy
chology.

In popular parlance the word object is commonly taken
without reference to the act of knowledge, and treated as
synonymous with individual subject of existence. Thus
if anyone ask what is the mind's object when you say
' Columbus discovered America in 1492,' most people will
reply ' Columbus,' or ' America,' or, at most, ' the discovery
of America.' They will name a substantive kernel or nu
cleus of the consciousness, and say the thought is ' about '
that, — as indeed it is, — and they will call that your thought's
* object.' Really that is usually only the grammatical
object, or more likely the grammatical subject, of your sen
tence. It is at most your ' fractional object ; ' or you may call
it the * topic ' of your thought, or the ' subject of your dis
course.' But the Object of your thought is really its entire
content or deliverance, neither more nor less. It is a vicious
use of speech to take out a substantive kernel from its con
tent and call that its object ; and it is an equally vicious use
of speech to add a substantive kernel not articulately in
cluded in its content, and to call that its object. Yet either
one of these two sins we commit, whenever we content our
selves with saying that a given thought is simply ' about ' a
certain topic, or that that topic is its * object.' The object of
my thought in the previous sentence, for example, is strictly
speaking neither Columbus, nor America, nor its discovery.
It is nothing short of the entire sentence, ' Columbus-dis
co vered-Ainerica-in-1492.' And if we wish to speak of it
substantively, we must make a substantive of it by writing
it out thus with hyphens between all its words. Nothing
but this can possibly name its delicate idiosyncrasy. And
if we wish to feel that idiosyncrasy we must reproduce the
thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed nud the

276 PSYCHOLOGY.

whole sentence bathed in that original halo of obscure rela
tions, which, like an horizon, then spread about its meaning.

Our psychological duty is to cling as closely as possible
to the actual constitution of the thought we are studying.
We may err as much by excess as by defect. If the kernel
or 'topic,' Columbus, is in one way less than the thought's
object, so in another wa}r it may be more. That is, when
named by the psychologist, it may mean much more than
actually is present to the thought of which he is reporter.
Thus, for example, suppose you should go on to think :
* He was a daring genius ! ' An ordinary psychologist would
not hesitate to say that the object of your thought was still
' Columbus.' True, your thought is about Columbus. It
' terminates ' in Columbus, leads from and to the direct
idea of Columbus. But for the moment it is not fully and
immediately Columbus, it is only ' he,' or rather ' he-was-
a-daring-genius ;' which, though it may be an unimportant
difference for conversational purposes, is, for introspective
psychology, as great a difference as there can be.

The object of every thought, then, is neither more nor
less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought
thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however
symbolic the manner of the thinking may be. It is need
less to say that memory can seldom accurately reproduce
such an object, when once it has passed from before the
mind. It either makes too little or too much of it. Its
best plan is to repeat the verbal sentence, if there was
one, in which the object was expressed. But for inarticu
late thoughts there is not even this resource, and intro
spection must confess that the task exceeds her powers.
The mass of our thinking vanishes for ever, beyond hope
of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few of the
crumbs that fall from the feast.

The next point to make clear is that, hoiuever complex the
object may be, the, thought of it is one undivided state of con
sciousness. As Thomas Brown says : *

" I have already spoken too often to require again to caution you
against the mistake into which, I confess, that the terms which the

* Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. Lecture 45.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 277

poverty of our language obliges us to use might of themselves very
naturally lead you ; the mistake of supposing that the most complex
states of mind are not truly, in their very essence, as much one and
indivisible as those which we term simple — the complexity and seem
ing coexistence which they involve being relative to our feeling * only,
not to their own absolute nature. I trust I need not repeat to you
that, in itself, every notion, however seemingly complex, is, and must
be, truly simple — being one state or affection, of one simple substance,
mind. Our conception of a whole army, for example, is as truly this
one mind existing in this one state, as our conception of any of the
individuals that compose an army. Our notion of the abstract num
bers, eight, four, two, is as truly one feeling of the mind as our notion
of simple unity."

The ordinary associationist-psychology supposes, in
contrast with this, that whenever an object of thought con
tains many elements, the thought itself must be made up
of just as many ideas, one idea for each element, and all
fused together in appearance, but really separate. f The
enemies of this psychology find (as we have already seen)
little trouble in showing that such a bundle of separate
ideas would never form one thought at all, and they con
tend that an Ego must be added to the bundle to give it
unity, and bring the various ideas into relation with each
other.J We will not discuss the ego just yet, but it is ob
vious that if things are to be thought in relation, they must
be thought together, and in one something, be that something
ego, psychosis, state of consciousness, or whatever you
please. If not thought with each other, things are not
thought in relation at all. Now most believers in the ego
make the same mistake as the associationists and sensa-
tionists whom they oppose. Both agree that the elements
of the subjective stream are discrete and separate and con
stitute what Kant calls a 'manifold.' But while the asso-

* Instead of saying to our feeling only, lie should have said, to the object
only.

f "There can be no difficulty in admitting that association does form
the ideas of an indefinite number of individuals into one complex idea;
because it is an acknowledged fact. Have we not the idea of an army?
And is not that precisely the ideas of an indefinite number of men formed
into one idea?" (Jas. Mill's Analysis of the Human Mind (J. S. Mill's
Edition), vol. i. p. 264.)

t For their arguments, see above, pp.

278 PSYCHOLOGY.

ciationists think that a 'manifold ' can form a single knowl
edge, the egoists deny this, and say that the knowledge
comes only when the manifold is subjected to the synthe-
tizing activity of an ego. Both make an identical initial
hypothesis ; but the egoist, finding it won't express the
facts, adds another hypothesis to correct it. Now I do not
wish just yet to ' commit myself ' about the existence or non-
existence of the ego, but I do contend that we need not
invoke it for this particular reason — namely, because tk<j
manifold of ideas has to be reduced to unity. There is no
manifold of coexisting ideas ; the notion of such a thing is
a chimera. Whatever things are thought in relation are
thought from the outset in a unity, in a single pulse of *ubjec-
tivity, a single psychosis, feeling, or state of mind.

The reason why this fact is so strangely garbled ^n the
books seems to be what on an earlier page (see p. 196 ff.) I
called the psychologist's fallacy. We have the inveterate
habit, whenever we try introspectively to describe o\ie of
our thoughts, of dropping the thought as it is in itseK and
talking of something else. We describe the things that
appear to the thought, and we describe other thoughts
about those things — as if these and the original thought
were the same. If, for example, the thought be ' the pack
of cards is on the table,' we say, " Well, isn't it a thought of
the pack of cards ? Isn't it of the cards as included in the
pack ? Isn't it of the table ? And of the legs of the table
as well ? The table has legs — how can you think the table
without virtually thinking its legs? Hasn't our thought
then, all these parts — one part for the pack and another for
the table ? And within the pack-part a part for each card,
as within the table-part a part for each leg ? And isn't
each of these parts an idea ? And can our thought, then,
be anything but an assemblage or pack of ideas, each
answering to some element of what it knows?"

Now not one of these assumptions is true. The thought
taken as an example is, in the first place, not of ' a pack of
cards.' It is of 'the-pack-of-cards-is-on-the-table,' an en
tirely different subjective phenomenon, whose Object implies
the pack, and every one of the cards in it, but whose conscious
Constitution bears very little resemblance to that of the

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 279

thought of the pack per se. What a thought is, and what it
may be developed into, or explained to stand for, and be
equivalent to, are two things, not one.*

An analysis of what passes through the mind as we utter
the phrase the pack of cards is on the table will, I hope, make
this clear, and may at the same time condense into a con
crete example a good deal of what has gone before.

3

The pack of cards is on the table

FIG. 29. —The Stream of Consciousness.

It takes time to utter the phrase. Let the horizontal
line in Fig. 29 represent time. Every part of it will then
stand for a fraction, every point for an instant, of the time.
Of course the thought has time-parts. The part 2-3 of it,
though continuous with 1-2, is yet a different part from 1-2.
Now I say of these time-parts that we cannot take any one
of them so short that it will not after some fashion or other
be a thought of the whole object 'the pack of cards is on
the table.' They melt into each other like dissolving views,
and no two of them feel the object just alike, but each feels
the total object in a unitary undivided way. This is what
I mean by denying that in the thought any parts can be
found corresponding to the object's parts. Time-parts are
not such parts.

* I know there are readers whom nothing can convince that the thought
of a complex object has not as many parts as are discriminated in the ob
ject itself. Well, then, let the word parts pass. Only observe that these
parts are not the separate 'ideas' of traditional psychology. No one of
them can live out of that particular thought, any more than my bead can
live off of my particular shoulders. In a sense a soap-bubble has parts; it is
a sum of juxtaposed spherical triangles. But these triangles are not sepa
rate realities; neither are the ' parts' of the thought separate realities.
Touch the bubble and the triangles are no more. Dismiss the thought
and out go its parts. You can no more make a new thought out of ' ideas'
that have once served than you can make a new bubble out of old triangles
Bach bubble, each thought, is a fresh organic unity, sui generis

280 PSYCHOLOGY.

Now let the vertical dimensions of the figure stand for
the objects or contents of the thoughts. A line vertical to
any point of the horizontal, as 1-1', will then symbolize the
object in the mind at the instant 1 ; a space above the hori
zontal, as 1-1'— 2'— 2, will symbolize all that passes through
the mind during the time 1-2 whose line it covers. The
entire diagram from 0 to 0' represents a finite length of
thought's stream.

Can we now define the psychic constitution of each ver
tical section of this segment ? We can, though in a very
rough way. Immediately after 0, even before we have
opened our mouths to speak, the entire thought is present to
our mind in the form of an intention to utter that sentence.
This intention, though it has no simple name, and though
it is a transitive state immediately displaced by the first
word, is yet a perfectly determinate phase of thought,
unlike anything else (see p. 253). Again, immediately
before 0', after the last word of the sentence is spoken, all
will admit that we again think its entire content as we
inwardly realize its completed deliverance. All vertical
sections made through any other parts of the diagram will
be respectively filled with other ways of feeling the sen
tence's meaning. Through 2, for example, the cards will
be the part of the object most emphatically present to the
mind ; through 4, the table. The stream is made higher in
the drawing at its end than at its beginning, because the
final way of feeling the content is fuller and richer than the
initial way. As Joubert says, " we only know just what we
meant to say, after we have said it." And as M. V. Eggef
remarks, " before speaking, one barely knows what one in
tends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration
and surprise at having said and thought it so well."

This latter author seems to me to have kept at much
closer quarters with the facts than any other analyst of con
sciousness.* But even he does not quite hit the mark, for,
as I understand him, he thinks that each word as it occu
pies the mind displaces the rest of the thought's content.
He distinguishes the 'idea' (what I have called the total

* In his work, La Parole luterieure (Paris, 1881), especially chapters
vi and vii.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 281

object or meaning) from the consciousness of the words,
calling the former a very feeble state, and contrasting it
with the liveliness of the words, even when these are only
silently rehearsed. " The feeling," he says, " of the words
makes ten or twenty times more noise in our consciousness
than the sense of the phrase, which for consciousness is a
very slight matter." * And having distinguished these two
things, he goes on to separate them in time, saying that the
idea may either precede or follow the words, but that it is
a 'pure illusion 'to suppose them simultaneous. f Now I
believe that in all cases where the words are understood, the
total idea may be and usually is present not only before
and after the phrase has been spoken, but also whilst each
separate word is uttered. :f It is the overtone, halo, or fringe
of the word, as spoken in that sentence. It is never absent ;
no word in an understood sentence comes to consciousness
as a mere noise. We feel its meaning as it passes ; and
although our object differs from one moment to another as
to its verbal kernel or nucleus, yet it is similar throughout
the entire segment of the stream. The same object is
known everywhere, now from the point of view, if we may
so call it, of this word, now from the point of view of that.
And in our feeling of each word there chimes an echo or
foretaste of every other. The consciousness of the ' Idea '

* Page 30l7~~

f Page 218. To prove this point, M. Egger appeals to the fact that we
often hear some one speak whilst our mind is preoccupied, but do not under
stand him until some moments afterwards, when we suddenly ' realize '
what he meant. Also to our digging out the meaning of a sentence in an
unfamiliar tongue, where the words are present to us long before the idea
is taken in. In these special cases the word does indeed precede the idea.
The idea, on the contrary, precedes the word whenever we try to express
ourselves with effort, as in a foreign tongue, or in an unusual Held of intel
lectual invention. Both sets of cases, however, are exceptional, and M.
Egger would probably himself admit, on reflection, that in the former class
there is some sort of a verbal suffusion, however evanescent, of the idea,
when it is grasped— we hear the echo of the words as we catch their mean
ing. And he would probably admit that in the second class of cases the
idea persists after the words that came with so much effort are found. In
normal cases the simultaneity, as he admits, is obviously there.

\ A good way to get the words and the sense separately is to inwardly
articulate word for word the discourse of another. One then finds thai
the meaning will often come to the mind in pulses, after clauses or sen
tences are finished.

282

PSYCHOLOGY.

and that of the words are thus consubstantial. They
are made of the same 'mind-stuff,' and form an un
broken stream. Annihilate a mind at any instant, cut
its thought through whilst yet uncompleted, and examine
the object present to the cross-section thus suddenly
made ; you will find, not the bald word in process of ut
terance, but that word suffused with the whole idea. The
word may be so loud, as M. Egger would say, that we
cannot tell just how its suffusion, as such, feels, or how it
differs from the suffusion of the next word. But it does
differ ; and we may be sure that, could we see into the brain,
we should find the same processes active through the entire
sentence in different degrees, each one in turn becoming
maximally excited and then yielding the momentary verbal
* kernel,' to the thought's content, at other times being only
sub-excited, and then combining with the other sub-excited
processes to give the overtone or fringe.*

We may illustrate this by a farther
development of the diagram on p. 279.
Let the objective content of any ver
tical section through the stream be
represented no longer by a line, but by
a plane figure, highest opposite whatever part of the object
is most prominent in consciousness
at the moment when the section is
made. This part, in verbal thought,
will usually be some word. A series
of sections 1-1', taken at the moments
1, 2, 3, would then look like this:

The horizontal breadth stands for the entire object
in each of the figures ; the height
of the curve above each part of
that object marks the relative
prominence of that part in the
thought. At the moment symbol
ized by the first figure pack is the
prominent part ; in the third figure it is table, etc.

* The nearest approach (with which I am acquainted) tolhe doctrine
set forth here is in O. Liebmann'a Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit PD
427-438.

The pack of cards is on the tab!
FIG. 80.

The pack of cards is on the table.
FIG. 31.

The pack of cards is on the table,
FIG. 32.

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 283

We can easily add all these plane sections together to
make a solid, one of whose solid dimensions will represent
time, whilst a cut across this at right angles will give the
thought's content at the moment when the cut is made.

FIG. 33.

Let it be the thought, ' I am the same I that I was yesterday.1
If at the fourth moment of time we annihilate the thinker and
examine how the last pulsation of his consciousness was
n. ade, we find that it was an awareness of the whole content
with same most prominent, and the other parts of the thing
known relatively less distinct. With each prolongation of
the scheme in the time-direction, the summit of the curve
of section would come further towards the end of the sen
tence. If we make a solid wooden frame with the sentence
written on its front, and the time-scale on one of its sides,
if we spread flatly a sheet of India rubber over its top, on
which rectangular co-ordinates are painted, and slide a
smooth ball under the rubber in the direction from 0 to
' yesterday,' the bulging of the membrane along this diagonal
at successive moments will symbolize the changing of the
thought's content in a way plain enough, after what has
been said, to call for no more explanation. Or to express
it in cerebral terms, it will show the relative intensities, at
successive moments, of the several nerve-processes to
which the various parts of the thought-object correspond.

The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention
is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream
is that

284 PSYCHOLOGY.

5) It is always interested more in one part of its object than in
another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the ivhile
it thinks.

The phenomena of selective attention and of delibera
tive will are of course patent examples of this choosing
activity. But few of us are aware how incessantly it is at
work in operations not ordinarily called by these names.
Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception
we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our
attention impartially over a number of impressions. A
monotonous succession of sonorous strokes is broken up
into rhythms, now of one sort, now of another, by the dif
ferent accent which we place on different strokes. The
simplest of these rhythms is the double one, tick-tock, tick-
tock, tick-tock. Dots dispersed on a surface are perceived
in rows and groups. Lines separate into diverse figures.
The ubiquity of the distinctions, this and that, here and
there, noio and then, in our minds is the result of our laying
the same selective emphasis on parts of place and time.

But we do far more than emphasize things, and unite
some, and keep others apart. We actually ignore most of the
things before us. Let me briefly show how this goes on.

To begin at the bottom, what are our very senses them
selves but organs of selection ? Out of the infinite chaos
of movements, of which physics teaches us that the outer
world consists, each sense-organ picks out those which fall
within certain limits of velocity. To these it responds, but
ignores the rest as completely as if they did not exist. It
thus accentuates particular movements in a manner for
which objectively there seems no valid ground ; for, as
Lange says, there is no reason whatever to think that the
gap *in Nature between the highest sound-waves and the
lowest heat-waves is an abrupt break like that of our sen
sations ; or that the difference between violet and ultra
violet rays has anything like the objective importance sub
jectively represented by that between light and darkness.
Out of what is in itself an undistinguishable, swarming
continuum, devoid of distinction or emphasis, our senses
make for us, by attending to this motion and ignoring that,

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 285

a world full of contrasts, of sharp accents, of abrupt changes,
of picturesque light and shade.

If the sensations we receive from a given organ have
their causes thus picked out for us by the conformation of
the organ's termination, Attention, on the other hand, out
of all the sensations yielded, picks out certain ones as
worthy of its notice and suppresses all the rest. Helm-
holtz's work on Optics is little more than a study of those
visual sensations of which common men never become
aware — blind spots, muscce volitantes, after-images, irradia
tion, chromatic fringes, marginal changes of color, double
images, astigmatism, movements of accommodation and
convergence, retinal rivalry, and more besides. We do not
even know without special training on which of our e}res an
image falls. So habitually ignorant are most men of this
that one may be blind for years of a single eye and never
know the fact.

Helmholtz says that we notice only those sensations
which are signs to us of things. But what are things ? Noth
ing, as we shall abundantly see, but special groups of sen
sible qualities, which happen practically or aesthetically to
interest us, to which we therefore give substantive names, and
which we exalt to this exclusive status of independence and
dignity. But in itself, apart from my interest, a particular
dust-wreath on a windy day is just as much of an individual
thing, and just as much or as little deserves an individual
name, as my own body does.

And then, among the sensations we get from each sepa
rate thing, what happens ? The mind selects again. It
chooses certain of the sensations to represent the thing
most truly, and considers the rest as its appearances, modi
fied by the conditions of the moment. Thus my table-top
is named square, after but one of an infinite number of
retinal sensations which it yields, the rest of them being
sensations of two acute and two obtuse angles ; but I call
the latter perspective views, and the four right angles the
true form of the table, and erect the attribute squareness
into the table's essence, for aesthetic reasons of my own.
In like manner, the real form of the circle is deemed to be
the sensation it gives when the line of vision is perpendicu-

286 PSYCHOLOGY.

lar to its centre — all its other sensations are signs of this
sensation. The real sound of the cannon is the sensation
it makes when the ear is close by. The real color of the
brick is the sensation it gives when the eye looks squarely
at it from a near point, out of the sunshine and yet not in
the gloom ; under other circumstances it gives us other
color-sensations which are but signs of this — we then see
it looks pinker or blacker than it really is. The reader
knows no object which he does not represent to himself by
preference as in some typical attitude, of some normal size,
at some characteristic distance, of some standard tint,
etc., etc. But all these essential characteristics, which to
gether form for us the genuine objectivity of the thing and
are contrasted with what we call the subjective sensations
it may yield us at a given moment, are mere sensations like
the latter. The mind chooses to suit itself, and decides
what particular sensation shall be held more real and valid
than all the rest.

Thus perception involves a twofold choice. Out of all
present sensations, we notice mainly such as are significant
of absent ones ; and out of all the absent associates which
these suggest, we again pick out a very few to stand for the
objective reality par excellence. We could have no more
exquisite example of selective industry.

That industry goes on to deal with the things thus given
in perception. A man's empirical thought depends on the
things he has experienced, but what these shall be is to a
large extent determined by his habits of attention. A thing
may be present to him a thousand times, but if he persist
ently fails to notice it, it cannot be said to enter into his ex
perience. We are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the
thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say
anything distinct ? On the other hand, a thing met only once
in a lifetime may leave an indelible experience in the mem
ory. Let four men make a tour in Europe. One will bring
home only picturesque impressions — costumes and colors,
parks and views and works of architecture, pictures and stat
ues. To another all this will be non-existent ; and distances
and prices, populations and drainage-arrangements, door-
and window-fastenings, and other useful statistics will take

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 287

their place. A third will give a rich account of the theatres,
restaurants, and public balls, and naught beside ; whilst
the fourth will perhaps have been so wrapped in his own
subjective broodings as to tell little more than a few names
of places through which he passed. Each has selected, out
of the same mass of presented objects, those which suited
his private interest and has made his experience thereby.

If, now, leaving the empirical combination of objects,
we ask how the mind proceeds rationally to connect them,
we find selection again to be omnipotent. In a future
chapter we shall see that all lieasoning depends on the
ability of the mind to break up the totality of the phe
nomenon reasoned about, into parts, and to pick out from
among these the particular one which, in our given emer
gency, may lead to the proper conclusion. Another pre
dicament will need another conclusion, and require another
element to be picked out. The man of genius is he who
will always stick in his bill at the right point, and bring it
out with the right element— 'reason ' if the emergency be
theoretical, ' means ' if it be practical — transfixed upon it.
I here confine myself to this brief statement, but it may
suffice to show that Eeasoning is but another form of the
selective activity of the mind.

If now we pass to its aesthetic department, our law is
still more obvious. The artist notoriously selects his items,
rejecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harmonize
with each other and with the main purpose of his work.
That unity, harmony, 'convergence of characters,' as M.
Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority
over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. Any
natural subject will do, if the artist has wit enough to
pounce upon some one feature of it as characteristic, and
suppress all merely accidental items which do not harmon
ize with this.

Ascending still higher, we reach the plane of Ethics,
where choice reigns notoriously supreme. An act has no
ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several
all equally possible. To sustain the arguments for the
good course and keep them ever before us, to stifle our

288 PSYCHOLOGY.

longing for more flowery ways, to keep the foot unflinch
ingly on the arduous path, these are characteristic ethical
energies. But more than these ; for these but deal with
the means of compassing interests already felt by the man
to be supreme. The ethical energy par excellence has to go
farther and choose which interest out of several, equally
coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the
utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man's entire career.
When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that
profession ? accept that office, or marry this fortune ? — his
choice really lies between one of several equally possible
I future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the
conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his
determinism by the argument that with a given fixed charac
ter only one reaction is possible under given circumstances,
forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what con
sciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the
character itself. The problem with the man is less what
act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall
now resolve to become.

Looking back, then, over this review, we see that the mind
is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities.
Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each
other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest
by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. The
highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered
from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath, out of
the mass offered by the faculty below that, which mass in
turn was sifted from a still larger amount of yet simpler
material, and so on. The mind, in short, works on the
data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block
of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity.
But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and
the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one
from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever
different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded
in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere
matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may,
if we like, by our reasonings unwind things back to that

THE STREAM OF THOUGHT. 289

black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds
of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world.
But all the while the world ice feel and live in will be that
which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes
of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by
simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other
sculptors, other statues from the same stone ! Other minds,
other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive
chaos ! My world is but one in a million alike embedded,
alike real to those who may abstract them. How different
must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish,
or crab !

But in my mind and your mind the rejected portions and
the selected portions of the original world-stuff are to a
great extent the same. The human race as a whole largely
agrees as to what it shall notice and name, and what not.
And among the noticed parts we select in much the same
way for accentuation and preference or subordination and
dislike. There is, however, one entirely extraordinary case
in which no two men ever are known to choose alike. One
great splitting of the whole universe into two halves is
made by each of us ; and for each of us almost all of the
interest attaches to one of the halves ; but we all draw
the line of division between them in a different place.
When I say that we all call the two halves by the same
names, and that those names are ' me ' and ' not-me ' re
spectively, it will at once be seen what I mean. The alto
gether unique kind of interest which each human mind
feels in those parts of creation which it can call me or mine
may be a moral riddle, but it is a fundamental psychologi
cal fact. No mind can take the same interest in his neigh
bor's me as in his own. The neighbor's me falls togethei
with all the rest of things in one foreign mass, against which
his own me stands out in startling relief. Even the trodden
worm, as Lotze somewhere says, contrasts his own suffer
ing self with the whole remaining universe, though he have
no clear conception either of himself or of what the uni
verse may be. He is for me a mere part of the world ;

290 PSYCHOLOGY.

for him it is I who am the mere part. Each of us dichoto
mizes the Kosmos in a different place.

Descending now to finer work than this first general
sketch, let us in the next chapter try to trace the psy
chology of this fact of self-consciousness to which we have
thus once more been led.

CHAPTER X.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF.

LET us begin with the Self in its widest acceptation,
and follow it up to its most delicate and subtle form, ad
vancing from the study of the empirical, as the Germans
call it, to that of the pure, Ego.

THE EMPIRICAL SELF OR ME.

The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is
tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that
between what a man calls me and what he simply calls
mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about
certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act
about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our
hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse
the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked.
And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are
they us ? Certainly men have been ready to disown their
very bodies and to regard them as mere vestures, or even
as prisons of clay from which they should some day be glad
to escape.

We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating
material. The same object being sometimes treated as a
part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then agaiL
as if I had nothing to do with it at all. In its ividesi
possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum fatal of all
that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers,
but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his
ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands
and horses, and yacht and bank-account. All these things*
give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, h#
feels triumphant ; if they dwindle and die away, he feels*
cast down, — not necessarily in the same degree for each

291

292 PSYCHOLOGY.

thing, but in much the same way for all. Understanding
5 the Self in this widest sense, we may begin by dividing the
' history of it into three parts, relating respectively to —

1. Its constituents ;

2. The feelings and emotions they arouse, — Self -feelings ;

3. The actions to which they prompt, — Self -seeking and
Self-preservation.

1. The constituents of the Self may be divided into two
classes, those which make up respectively —

(a) The material Self;

(b) The social Self ;

(c) The spiritual Self ; and

(d) The pure Ego.

(a) The body is the innermost part of the material Self
in each of us ; and certain parts of the body seem more
intimately ours than the rest. The clothes come next.
The old saying that the human person is composed of
three parts— soul, body and clothes — is more than a joke.
We so appropriate our clothes and identify ourselves with
them that there are few of us who, if asked to choose
between having a beautiful body clad in raiment perpetu
ally shabby and unclean, and having an ugly and blemished
form always spotlessly attired, would not hesitate a moment
before making a decisive reply. * Next, our immediate
family is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our
wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our
flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone.
If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are
insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in
their place. Our home comes next. Its scenes are part
of our life ; its aspects awaken the tenderest feelings of
affection ; and we do not easily forgive the stranger who,
; in visiting it, finds fault with its arrangements or treats it
' with contempt. All these different things are the objects
of instinctive preferences coupled with the most impor
tant practical interests of life. We all have a blind im
pulse to watch over our body, to deck it with clothing of

* See, for a charming passage on the Philosophy of Dress, H. Lotze's
Microcosmus, Eng. tr. vol. i. p. 592 ff.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 293

an ornamental sort, to cherish parents, wife and babes,
and to find for ourselves a home of our own which we may
live in and 'improve.'

An equally instinctive impulse drives us to collect prop
erty ; and the collections thus made become, with different
degrees of intimacy, parts of our empirical selves. The
parts of our wealth most intimately ours are those which
are saturated with our labor. There are few men who
would not feel personally annihilated if a life-long con
struction of their hands or brains — say an entomological
collection or an extensive work in manuscript — were
/ suddenly swept away. The miser feels similarly towards
his gold, and although it is true that a part of our depres
sion at the loss of possessions is due to our feeling that we
must now go without certain goods that we expected the
possessions to bring in their train, yet in every case there
remains, over and above this, a sense of the shrinkage of
our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to
nothingness, which is a psychological phenomenon by
itself. We are all at once assimilated to the tramps and
poor devils whom we so despise, and at the same time re
moved farther than ever away from the happy sons ot
earth who lord it over land and sea and men in the full
blown lustihood that wealth and power can give, and
before whom, stiffen ourselves as we will by appealing to
| anti-snobbish first principles, we cannot escape an emo-
1 tion, open or sneaking, of respect and dread.

(b) A mans Social Self is the recognition which he gets
from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking
to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propen
sity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our
kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised,
were such a thing physically possible, than that one should
be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed
by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when
we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we
did, but if every person we met * cut us dead,' and acted as
if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent
despair would ere long well up in us, from which the

294 PSYCHOLOGY.

cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief ; for these would
make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had

: not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention
at all.

Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as
there are individuals ivho recognize him and carry an image
of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his
images is to wound him.* But as the individuals who
carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practi
cally say that he has as many different social selves as
there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion
he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself
to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is
demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears
and swaggers like a pirate among his ' tough ' young friends.
We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-
companions, to our customers as to the laborers we em
ploy, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate
friends. From this there results what practically is a

I division of the man into several selves; and this may be a
• discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of
his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere ; or it may
be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one
tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners
under his command.

The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have
is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The
good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense
elation and dejection — unreasonable enough as measured

j by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of

j the individual. To his own consciousness he is not, so long
as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and
when it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds.

A man's fame, good or bad, and his honor or dishonor,
are names for one of his social selves. The particular
social self of a man called his honor is usually the result
of one of those splittings of which we have spoken. It is
his image in the eyes of his own ' set,' which exalts or con-

* " Who filches from me my good name," etc.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 295

demns him as he conforms or not to certain requirements
that may not be made of one in another walk of life. Thus
a layman may abandon a city infected with cholera ; but a
priest or a doctor would think such an act incompatible
with his honor. A soldier's honor requires him to fight or
to die under circumstances where another man can apolo- \
gize or run away with no stain upon his social self. A
judge, a statesman, are in like manner debarred by the
honor of their cloth from entering into pecuniary relations
perfectly honorable to persons in private life. Nothing is
commoner than to hear people discriminate between their
different selves of this sort : "As a man I pity you, but as
an official I must show you no mercy ; as a politician I
regard him as an ally, but as a moralist I loathe him ;" etc.,
etc. What may be called ' club-opinion ' is one of the very
strongest forces in life.* The thief must not steal from
other thieves ; the gambler must pay his gambling-debts,
though he pay 110 other debts in the world. The code of
honor of fashionable society has throughout history been
full of permissions as well as of vetoes, the only reason for
following either of which is that so we best serve one of

* " He who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong
motives on men . . . seems little skilled in the nature and history of man
kind; the greatest part whereof he shall find to govern themselves chiefly,
if not solely, by this law of fashion ; and so they do that which keeps
them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God or the
magistrate. The penalties that attend the breach of God's laws some, nay,
most, men seldom seriously reflect on; and amongst those that do, many,
whilst they break the laws, entertain thoughts of future reconciliation,
and making their peace for such breaches : and as tc the punishments due
from the laws of the commonwealth, they frequently flatter themselves
with the hope of impunity. But no man escapes the punishment of their
censure and dislike who offends against the fashion and opinion of the
company he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one
in ten thousand who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the
constant dislike and condemnation of his own club. He must be of a
strange and unusual constitution who can content himself to live in con
stant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude many
men have sought and been reconciled to; but nobody that has the least
thought or sense of a man about him can live in society under the
constant dislike and ill opinion of his familiars and those he converses
with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must be
made up of irreconcilable contradictions who can take pleasure in com
pany and yet be insensible of contempt and disgrace from his companions. "
(Jjocke's Essay, book n. ch. xxvin. § 12.)

296 PSYCHOLOGY.

our social selves. You must not lie in general, but you
may lie as much as you please if asked about your relations
with a lady ; you must accept a challenge from an equal,
but if challenged by an inferior you may laugh him to
scorn : these are examples of what is meant.

(c) By the Spiritual Self, so far as it belongs to the
Empirical Me, I mean a man's inner or subjective being, his
psychic faculties or dispositions, taken concretely ; not the
bare principle of personal Unity, or ' pure ' Ego, which
remains still to be discussed. These psychic dispositions
are the most enduring and intimate part of the self, that
which we most verily seem to be. We take a purer self-
satisfaction when we think of our ability to argue and dis
criminate, of our moral sensibility and conscience, of our
indomitable will, than when we survey any of our other
possessions. Only when these are altered is a man said to
be alienatus a se.

Now this spiritual self may be considered in various
ways. We may divide it into faculties, as just instanced,
isolating them one from another, and identifying ourselves
with either in turn. This is an abstract way of dealing with
consciousness, in which, as it actually presents itself, a
plurality of such faculties are always to be simultaneously
found ; or we may insist on a concrete view, and then the
1 spiritual self in us will be either the entire stream of our
) personal consciousness, or the present ' segment ' or ' sec
tion ' * of that stream, according as we take a broader or a
narrower view — both the stream and the section being con
crete existences in time, and each being a unity after its
own peculiar kind. But whether we take it abstractly or
concretely, our considering the spiritual self at all is a
reflective process, is the result of our abandoning the out
ward-looking point of view, and of our having become able
to think of subjectivity as such, to think ourselves as thinkers.

This attention to thought as such, and the identification
of ourselves with it rather than with any of the objects
which it reveals, is a momentous and in some respects a
rather mysterious operation, of which we need here only
say that as a matter of fact it exists ; and that in everyone,
at an early age, the distinction between thought as such,

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 297

and what it is ' of ' or ' about/ has become familiar to the
mind. The deeper grounds for this discrimination may
possibly be hard to find ; but superficial grounds are plenty
and near at hand. Almost anyone will tell us that thought
is a different sort of existence from things, because many
sorts of thought are of no things — e.g., pleasures, pains,
and emotions ; others are of non-existent things— errors
and fictions ; others again of existent things, but in a form
that is symbolic and does not resemble them — abstract y
ideas and concepts ; whilst in the thoughts that do resem- '
ble the things they are ' of ' (percepts, sensations), we can
feel, alongside of the thing known, the thought of it going
on as an altogether separate act and operation in the mind.

Now this subjective life of ours, distinguished as such
so clearly from the objects known by its means, may, as
aforesaid, be taken by us in a concrete or in an abstract
way. Of the concrete way I will say nothing just now, ex
cept that the actual ' section ' of the stream will ere long,
in our discussion of the nature of the principle of unity in
consciousness, play a very important part. The abstract
way claims our attention first. If the stream as a whole is
identified with the Self far more than any outward thing, a
certain portion of the stream abstracted from the rest is so ,
identified in an altogether peculiar degree, and is felt by all |
men as a sort of innermost centre within the circle, of sanc
tuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life
as a whole. Compared with this element of the stream,
the other parts, even of the subjective life, seem transient
external possessions, of which each in turn can be disowned,
whilst that which disowns them remains. Now, ivhat is
this self of all the other selves ?

Probably all men would describe it in much the same
way up to a certain point. They would call it the active
element in all consciousness ; saying that whatever quali
ties a man's feelings may possess, or whatever content his
thought may include, there is a spiritual something in
him which seems to go out to meet these qualities and
contents, whilst they seem to come in to be received by it.
It is what welcomes or rejects. It presides over the per
ception of sensations, and by giving or withholding its

298 PSYCHOLOGY.

assent it influences the movements they tend to arouse.
It is the home of interest, — not the pleasant or the painful,
not even pleasure or pain, as such, but that within us to
which pleasure and pain, the pleasant and the painful, speak.

I It is the source of effort and attention, and the place from
which appear to emanate the fiats of the will. A physiol
ogist who should reflect upon it in his own person could
hardly help, I should think, connecting it more or less
vaguely with the process by which ideas or incoming sensa
tions are ' reflected ' or pass over into outward acts. Not
necessarily that it should be this process or the mere feel
ing of this process, but that it should be in some close way
related to this process ; for it plays a part analogous to it in
the psychic life, being a sort of junction at which sensory
ideas terminate and from which motor ideas proceed, and
forming a kind of link between the two. Being more in-

I cessantly there than any other single element of the mental
life, the other elements end by seeming to accrete round it

1 and to belong to it. It become opposed to them as the per
manent is opposed to the changing and inconstant.

One may, I think, without fear of being upset by any
future Galtonian circulars, believe that all men must single
out from the rest of what they call themselves some central

( principle of which each would recognize the foregoing to be

( a fair general description,— accurate enough, at any rate, to
denote what is meant, and keep it unconfused with other
things. The moment, however, they came to closer quarters
with it, trying to define more accurately its precise nature,
we should find opinions beginning to diverge. Some would
say that it is a simple active substance, the soul, of which
they are thus conscious ; others, that it is nothing but a
fiction, the imaginary being denoted by the pronoun I ; and
between these extremes of opinion all sorts of intermediaries
would be found.

Later we must ourselves discuss them all, and sufficient
to that day will be the evil thereof. Now, let us try to
settle for ourselves as definitely as we can, just how this
central nucleus of the Self may feel, no matter whether it be
a spiritual substance or only a delusive word.

For this central part of the Self is felt. It may be all that

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 299

Transcendentalists say it is, and all tliat Empiricists say it
is into the bargain, but it is at any rate no mere ens rationis,
Cognized only in an intellectual way, and no mere summation
of memories or mere sound of a word in our ears. It is some-
tiling with which we also have direct sensible acquaintance,
and which is as fully present at any moment of conscious
ness in which it is present, as in a whole lifetime of such
moments. When, just now, it was called an abstraction,
that did not mean that, like some general notion, it could
not be presented in a particular experience. It only meant
that in the stream of consciousness it never was found all
alone. But when it is found, it is felt; just as the body is
felt, the feeling of which is also an abstraction, because never
is the body felt all alone, but always together with other
things. Now can we tell more precisely in wliat the feeling of
this central active self consists, — not necessarily as yet what
the active self is, as a being or principle, but what we feel
when we become aware of its existence?

I think I can in my own case ; and as what I say will
be likely to meet with opposition if generalized (as indeed
it may be in part inapplicable to other individuals), I had
better continue in the first person, leaving my description
to be accepted by those to whose introspection it may com-j
mend itself as true, and confessing my inability to meet the
demands of others, if others there be.

First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherances
and Inndrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, ten
dencies which run with desire, and tendencies which run the
other way. Among the matters I think of, some range them
selves on the side of the thought's interests, whilst others
play an unfriendly part thereto. The mutual inconsisten
cies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which
obtain amonst these objective matters reverberate back
wards and produce what seem to be incessant reactions of
my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appro
priating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes
or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central
nucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that all men
might use.

But when I forsake such general descriptions and grai?

800 PSYCHOLOGY.

pie with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarters
with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any
purely spiritual dement at all. Whenever my introspective
glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of
these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel
J jj distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place
within the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure in
these introspective results, let me try to state those particu
lars which to my own consciousness seem indubitable and
distinct.

In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, ne
gating, making an effort, are felt as movements of some
thing in the head. In many cases it is possible to describe
these movements quite exactly. In attending to either an
idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sense-sphere,
the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt as
it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example,
without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, converg
ences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs.
The direction in which the object is conceived to lie deter
mines the character of these movements, the feeling of
which becomes, for my consciousness, identified with the
manner in which I make myself ready to receive the visible
thing. My brain appears to me as if all shot across with
lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my
attention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in
passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of
varying sense-ideas.

When I try to remember or reflect, the movements in
question, instead of being directed towards the periphery,
seem to come from the periphery inwards and feel like a
sort of withdrawal from the outer world. As far as I can
detect, these feelings are clue to an actual rolling outwards
and upwards of the eyeballs, such as I believe occurs in
, j me in sleep, and is the exact opposite of their action in fix
ating a physical thing. In reasoning, I find that I am apt
to have a kind of vaguely localized diagram in my mind,
with the various fractional objects of the thought disposed
at particular points thereof ; and the oscillations of my at
tention from one of them to another are most distinctly felt

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 301

as alternations of direction in movements occurring inside
the head.*

In consenting and negating, and in making a mental
effort, the movements seem more complex, and I find them
harder to describe. The opening and closing of the glottis
play a great part in these operations, and, less distinctly,
the movements of the soft palate, etc., shutting off the pos
terior nares from the mouth. My glottis is like a sensitive
valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every
mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of my
thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through
my throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is over
come. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me,
one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The move
ments of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond
very sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness
or disagreeableness of what comes before my mind.

In effort of any sort, contractions of the jaw-muscles and
of those of respiration are added to those of the brow and
glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head proper
ly so called. It passes out of the head whenever the wel
coming or rejecting of the object is strongly felt. Then a
set of feelings pour in from many bodily parts, all ' expres
sive ' of my emotion, and the head-feelings proper are
swallowed up in this larger mass.

In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one per
son at least, the ' Self of selves,' ivhen carefully examined,
is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar
motions in the head or between the head and throat. I do
not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for I
fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in this
field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are
the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most
distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yet
define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions
in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire
feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that

* For some farther remarks on these feelings of movement see the
next chapter.

302 P8TCHOLOG Y.

name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature
is by most men overlooked.

Now, without pledging ourselves in any way to adopt this
hypothesis, let us dally with it for a while to see to what
consequences it might lead if it were true.

In the first place, the nuclear part of the Self, inter
mediary between ideas and overt acts, would be a collection
of activities physiologically in no essential way different
from the overt acts themselves. If we divide all possible
physiological acts into adjustments and executions, the
nuclear self would be the adjustments collectively consid
ered ; and the less intimate, more shifting self, so far as
it was active, would be the executions. But both adjust
ments and executions would obey the reflex type. Both
would be the result of sensorial and ideational processes
discharging either into each other within the brain, or into
muscles and other parts oiitside. The peculiarity of the
adjustments would be that they are minimal reflexes, few
in number, incessantly repeated, constant amid great fluc
tuations in the rest of the mind's content, and entirely
unimportant and uninteresting except through their uses
in furthering or inhibiting the presence of various things,
and actions before consciousness. These characters would
naturally keep us from introspectively paying much atten
tion to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time
make us aware of them as a coherent group of processes,
strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness
contained, — even with the other constituents of the ' Self/
material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. They
are reactions, and they are primary reactions. Everything
arouses them ; for objects which have no other effects
will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis
close. It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an
entrance-examination, and just show its face so as to be
either approved or sent back. These primary reactions
are like the opening or the closing of the door. In the
midst of psychic change they are the permanent core
of turnings-towards and turnings-from, of yieldings and
arrests, which naturally seem central and interior in com-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. SOB

parison with the foreign matters, apropos to which they
occur, and hold a sort of arbitrating, decisive position, qnite
unlike that held by any of the other constituents of the Me.
It would not be surprising, then, if we were to feel them as
the birthplace of conclusions and the starting point of acts,
or if they came to appear as what we called a while back
the ' sanctuary within the citadel ' of our personal life.*

* Wundt's account of Self-consciousness deserves to be compared with
this. What I have called ' adjustments ' he calls processes of ' Appercep
tion. ' ' ' In this development (of consciousness) one particular group of per
cepts claims a prominent significance, namely, those of which the spring
lies in ourselves. The images of feelings we get from our own body, and
the representations of our own movements distinguish themselves from all
others by forming a permanent group. As there are always some muscles
in a state either of tension or of activity it follows that we never lack a
sense, either dim or clear, of the positions or movements of our body. . . .
This permanent sense, moreover, has this peculiarity, that we are aware of
our power at any moment voluntarily to arouse any one of its ingredients.
We excite the sensations of movement immediately by such impulses of the
will as shall arouse the movements themselves; and we excite the visual
and tactile feelings of our body by the voluntary movement of our orgaui
of sense. So we come to conceive this permanent mass of feeling as
immediately or remotely subject to our will, and call it the consciousness oj
ourself. This self-consciousness is, at the outset, thoroughly sensational,
. . . only gradually the second-named of its characters, its subjection to
«>ur will, attains predominance. In proportion as the apperception of all
our mental objects appears to us as an inward exercise of will, does our
self -consciousness begin both to widen itself and to narrow itself at the
same time. It widens itself in that every mental act whatever comes to
stand in relation to our will; and it narrows itself in that it concentrates
Itself more and more upon the inner activity of apperception, over against
which our own body and all the representations connected with it appear
as external objects, different from our proper self. This consciousness,
contracted down to the process of apperception, we call our Ego ; and the
apperception of mental objects in general, may thus, after Leibnitz, be
designated as the raising of them into our self-consciousness. Thus the
natural development of self-consciousness implicitly involves the most
abstract forms in which this faculty has been described in philosophy; only
philosophy is fond of placing the abstract ego at the outset, and so revers
ing the process of development. Nor should we overlook the fact that the
completely abstract ego [as pure activity], although suggested by the
natural development of our consciousness, is never actually found therein.
The most speculative of philosophers is incapable of disjoining his ego
from those bodily feelings and images which form the incessant back
ground of his awareness of himself. The notion of his ego as such is, like
every notion, derived from sensibility, for the process of apperception itself
comes to our knowledge chiefly through those feelings of tension [what I
have above called inward adjustments] which accompany it." (Physiolo-
gische Psychologic, 2te Autl. Bd. n. pp. 217-19.)

304 PSYCHOLOGY.

If they really were the innermost sanctuary, the
mate one of all the selves whose being we can ever directly
experience, it would follow that all that is experienced is,
strictly considered, objective; that this Objective falls asun
der into two contrasted parts, one realized as ' Self,' the
other as ' not-Self ;' and that over and above these parts
there is nothing save the fact that they are known, the fact
of the stream of thought being there as the indispensable
subjective condition of their being experienced at all. But
this condition of the experience is not one of the things ex
perienced at the moment ; this knowing is not immediately
knoivn. It is only known in subsequent reflection. Instead,
then, of the stream of thought being one of ccw-sciousness,
" thinking its own existence along with whatever else it
thinks," (as Ferrier says) it might be better called a stream
of Sciousness pure and simple, thinking objects of some of
which it makes what it calls a ' Me,' and only aware of its
1 pure ' Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way.
Each ' section ' of the stream would then be a bit of scious-
ness or knowledge of this sort, including and contemplat
ing its * me ' and its ' not-me ' as objects which work out their
drama together, but not yet including or contemplating its
own subjective being. The sciousness in question would be
the Thinker, and the existence of this thinker would be given
to us rather as a logical postulate than as that direct inner
perception of spiritual activity which we naturally believe
ourselves to have. ' Matter,' as something behind physical
phenomena, is a postulate of this sort. Between the postu
lated Matter and the postulated Thinker, the sheet of phe
nomena would then swing, some of them (the ' realities ')
pertaining more to the matter, others (the fictions, opinions,
and errors) pertaining more to the Thinker. But wlio the
Thinker would be, or how many distinct Thinkers we ought
to suppose in the universe, would all be subjects for an
ulterior metaphysical inquiry.

Speculations like this traverse common-sense; and not
only do they traverse common sense (which in philosophy
is no insuperable objection) but they contradict the funda
mental assumption of every philosophic school. Spiri
tualists, transcendentalists, and empiricists alike admit in

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 305

us a continual direct perception of the thinking activity in
the concrete. However they may otherwise disagree, they
vie with each other in the cordiality of their recognition of
our thoughts as the one sort of existent which skepticism
cannot touch. * I will therefore treat the last few pages as
a parenthetical digression, and from now to the end of the
volume revert to the path of common-sense again. I mean
by this that I will continue to assume (as I have assumed
all along, especially in the last chapter) a direct awareness
of the process of our thinking as such, simply insisting on
the fact that it is an even more inward and subtle phenome
non than most of us suppose. At the conclusion of the
volume, however, I may permit myself to revert again to the
doubts here provisionally mooted, and will indulge in some
metaphysical reflections suggested by them.

At present, then, the only conclusion I come to is the
following : That (in some persons at least) the part of the
innermost Self which is most vividly felt turns out to con
sist for the most part of a collection of cephalic move
ments of ' adjustments ' which, for want of attention and
reflection, usually fail to be perceived and classed as what
they are ; that over and above these there is an obscurer
feeling of something more ; but whether it be of fainte"
physiological processes, or of nothing objective at all, but
rather of subjectivity as such, of thought become ' its own
object/ must at present remain an open question, — like the
question whether it be an indivisible active soul-substance,
or the question whether it be a personification of the pronoun
I, or any other of the guesses as to what its nature may
be.

Farther than this we cannot as yet go clearly in our
analysis of the Self's constituents. So let us proceed to the
emotions of Self which they arouse.

2. SELF-FEELINO.

These are primarily self-complacency and self-aissatis-
f action. Of what is called ' self-love,' I will treat a little

*The only exception I know of is M. J. Souriau, in his important
article in the Revue Philosophique, vol. xxn. p. 449. M. Souriau's con
clusion is ' que la conscience u'existe pas ' 'p. 472).

306 PSYCHOLOGY.

farther on. Language has synonyms enough for both pri
mary feelings. Thus pride, conceit, vanity, self-esteem,
arrogance, vainglory, on the one hand; and on the other
modesty, humility, confusion, diffidence, shame, mortifica
tion, contrition, the sense of obloquy and personal despair.
These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and
elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists
would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary
phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensi
ble pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased
personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the repre
sented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum
of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of
shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly
rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a
fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expecta
tion of reward is not the self-satisfaction, and the mere
apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is
a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us
carries about with him, and which is independent of the
objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent.
That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in
unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure
and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his
powers to the end.

One may say, however, that the normal provocative of
self-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the good
or bad actual position one holds in the world. " He put in
his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy
am I." A Eian with a broadly extended empirical Ego,
with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with
place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be
visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself
which he had when he was a boy. " Is not this great
Babylon, which I have planted ?" * Whereas he who has
made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life
among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow

* See the excellent remarks by Prof. Bain on the 'Emotion of Power'
in his ' Emotions and the Will. '

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 307

all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials
with which his powers can really cope.

The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abase
ment are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as
a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or
pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expres
sion. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are inner
vated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and
elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon
the lips. This whole complex of symptoms is seen in an
exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain
some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and
whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swag
gering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any
valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of
despair that we find the strongest examples of the opposite
physiognomy, in good people who think they have com
mitted ' the unpardonable sin ' and are lost forever, who
crouch and cringe and slink from notice, and are unable to
speak aloud or look us in the eye. Like fear and like
anger, in similar morbid conditions, these opposite feelings
of Self may be aroused with no adequate exciting cause.
And in fact we ourselves know how the barometer of our
self-esteem and confidence rises and falls from one day to
another through causes that seem to be visceral and organic
rather than rational, and which certainly answer to no cor
responding variations in the esteem in which we are held
by our friends. Of the origin of these emotions in the race,
we can speak better when we have treated of —

3. SELF-SEEKING AKD SELP-PBESEBVATION.

These words cover a large number of our fundamental
instinctive impulses. We have those of bodily self-seeldng,
those of social self-seeking, and those of spiritual self-seeking.

All the ordinary useful reflex actions and movements
of alimentation and defence are acts of bodily self-preser
vation. Fear and anger prompt to acts that are useful
in the same way. Whilst if by self-seeking we mean
the providing for the future as distinguished from main
taining the present, we must class both anger and fear

J08 PSYCHOLOGY,

with the hunting, the acquisitive, the home-constructing
and the tool-constructing instincts, as impulses to self-
seeking of the bodily kind. Keally, however, these latter
instincts, with amativeness, parental fondness, curiosity
and emulation, seek not only the development of the
bodily Self, but that of the material Self in the widest pos
sible sense of the word.

Our social self-seeking, in turn, is carried on directly
through our amativeness and friendliness, our desire to
please and attract notice and admiration, our emulation
and jealousy, our love of glory, influence, and power,
and indirectly through whichever of the material self-
seeking impulses prove serviceable as means to social
ends. That the direct social self-seeking impulses are
probably pure instincts is easily seen. The noteworthy
thing about the desire to be ' recognized ' by others is that
its strength has so little to do with the worth of the recog
nition computed in sensational or rational terms. We are
crazy to get a visiting-list which shall be large, to be able
to say when any one is mentioned, " Oh ! I know him well,"
and to be bowed to in the street by half the people we
meet. Of course distinguished friends and admiring
recognition are the most desirable — Thackeray somewhere
asks his readers to confess whether it would not give
each of them an exquisite pleasure to be met walking down
Pall Mall with a duke on either arm. But in default of
dukes and envious salutations almost anything will do for
some of us ; and there is a whole race of beings to-day
whose passion is to keep their names in the newspapers,
no matter under what heading, ' arrivals and departures,'
' personal paragraphs,' ' interviews,' — gossip, even scandal,
will suit them if nothing better is to be had. Guiteau,
Garfield's assassin, is an example of the extremity to which
this sort of craving for the notoriety of print may go in a
pathological case. The newspapers bounded his mental
horizon ; and in the poor wretch's prayer on the scaffold,
one of the most heartfelt expressions was : " The newspaper
press of this land has a big bill to settle with thee, O Lord !'*

Not only the people but the places and things 1 know
enlarge my Self in a sort of metaphoric social way. *£7a

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 309

me connait,' as the French workman says of tlie implement
he can use well. So that it comes about that persons for
whose opinion we care nothing are nevertheless persons
whose notice we woo ; and that many a man truly great,
many a woman truly fastidious in most respects, will take a
deal of trouble to dazzle some insignificant cad whose
whole personality they heartily despise.

Under the head of spiritual self-seeking ought to be
included every impulse towards psychic progress, whether
intellectual, moral, or spiritual in the narrow sense of the
term. It must be admitted, however, that much that com
monly passes for spiritual self-seeking in this narrow sense
is only material and social self-seeking beyond the grave.
In the Mohammedan desire for paradise and the Christian
aspiration not to be damned in hell, the materiality of the
goods sought is undisguised. In the more positive and
refined view of heaven many of its goods, the fellowship of
the saints and of our dead ones, and the presence of God,
are but social goods of the most exalted kind. It is only
the search of the redeemed inward nature, the spotlessness
from sin, whether here or hereafter, that can count as
spiritual self-seeking pure and undefiled.

But this broad external review of the facts of the life 01
the Self will be incomplete without some account of the

RIVALRY AND CONFLICT OF THE DIFFERENT SELVES.

With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our
choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it
is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of stand
ing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest.
Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and
fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million
a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a
philosopher ; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and
African explorer, as well as a ' tone-poet ' and saint. But
the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work
would run counter to the saint's ; the bon-vivant and the
philanthropist would trip each other up ; the philosopher
and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same

,

310 PSYCHOLOGY.

tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceiv
ably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But
to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less
be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest,
deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the
one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves
thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are
real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real tri
umphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is
as strong an example as there is of that selective industry
of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 284 if.).
Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of
a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses
one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith
reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted
expressly as its own.

II, who for the time have staked my all on being a
psychologist, am mortified if others know much more
/ psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the
grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me
no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I ' pretensions'
to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So
we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he
is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the
world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the
globe minus one is nothing ; he has ' pitted ' himself to
beat that one ; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing
else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, in
deed he is not.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat,
suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned
the attempt to ' carry that line,' as the merchants say, of
self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure ; with
no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world
depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.
It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our sup
posed potentialities ; a fraction of which our pretensions
are the denominator and the numerator our success : thus,

rSTi ("» /"» O G Q

Self-esteem — p^ensions ' SucJl a fracti°n ma7 be increased

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 311

as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the
numerator.* To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief a^
to get them gratified ; and where disappointment is incessant ,
and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do.
The history of evangelical theology, with its conviction of
sin, its self-despair, and its abandonment of salvation by
works, is the deepest of possible examples, but we meet
others in every walk of life. There is the strangest light
ness about the heart when one's nothingness in a particular
line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in
the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable ' No.'
Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other
cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day,
if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up
a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them
call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when
we give up striving to be young, — or slender ! Thank God !
we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the
Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who
lost every penny during our civil war went and actually
rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy
since he was born.

Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. As
Carlyle says : " Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast j
thou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our
time write, it is only with renunciation that life, properly
speaking, can be said to begin."

Neither threats nor pleadings can move a man unless
they touch some one of his potential or actual selves. Only
thus can we, as a rule, get a * purchase ' on another's will.
The first care of diplomatists and mouarchs and all who wish
to rule or influence is, accordingly, to find out their victim's
strongest principle of self-regard, so as to make that the

* Cf. Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, 'The Everlasting Yea.' "Itelltbee,
blockhead, it all comes of thy vanity ; of what thou fanciest those same
deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most
likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot : fancy that thou deserv
est to be hanged in a hair halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp. . . .
What act of legislature was there that thou shouldst be happy ? A little
while ajro thou hadst no right to be&t all." etc.. etc.

312 PSYCHOLOGY.

fulcrum of all appeals. But if a man lias given up those
things which are subject to foreign fate, and ceased to
regard them as parts of himself at all, we are well-nigh
powerless over him. The Stoic receipt for contentment
was to dispossess yourself in advance of all that was out of
your own power, — then fortune's shocks might rain down
unfelt. Epictetus exhorts us, by thus narrowing and at the
same time solidifying our Self to make it invulnerable : " I
must die ; well, but must I die groaning too ? I will speak
what appears to be right, and if the despot says, then I
will put you to death, I will reply, ' When did I ever tell
you that I was immortal ? You will do your part and I
mine ; it is yours to kill and mine to die intrepid ; yours to
banish, mine to depart untroubled.' How do we act in a
voyage ? We choose the pilot, the sailors, the hour. After
wards comes a storm. What have I to care for ? My part
is performed. This matter belongs to the pilot. But the
ship is sinking ; what then have I to do ? That which alone
I can do — submit to being drowned without fear, without
clamor or accusing of God, but as one who knows that
what is born must likewise die." *

This Stoic fashion, though efficacious and heroic enough
in its place and time, is, it must be confessed, only possible
as an habitual mood of the soul to narrow and unsympa
thetic characters. It proceeds altogether by exclusion. If
I am a Stoic, the goods I cannot appropriate cease to be my
goods, and the temptation lies very near to deny that they
are goods at all. We find this mode of protecting the Self
by exclusion and denial very common among people who
are in other respects not Stoics. All narrow people intrench
their Me, they retract it, — from the region of what they can
not securely possess. People who don't resemble them, or
who treat them with indifference, people over whom they
gain no influence, are people on whose existence, however
meritorious it may intrinsically be, they look with chill
negation, if not with positive hate. Who will not be mine
I will exclude from existence altogether ; that is, as far as

*T. W. Higginson's translation Q866), p. 105.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 313

I can make it so, such people shall be as if they were not.*
Thus may a certain absoluteness and definiteness in the
outline of my Me console me for the smallness of its con
tent.

Sympathetic people, on the contrary, proceed by the
entirely opposite way of expansion and inclusion. The out
line of their self often gets uncertain enough, but for this
the spread of its content more than atones. Nil humani a
me alienum. Let them despise this little person of mine,
and treat me like a dog, / shall not negate them so long as |w
I have a soul in my body. They are realities as much as I
am. What positive good is in them shall be mine too, etc.,
etc. The magnanimity of these expansive natures is often
touching indeed. Such persons can feel a sort of delicate
rapture in thinking that, however sick, ill-favored, mean-
conditioned, and generally forsaken they may be, they yet
are integral parts of the whole of this brave world, have a
fellow's share in the strength of the dray-horses, the happi
ness of the young people, the wisdom of the wise ones,
and are not altogether without part or lot in the good for
tunes of the Yanderbilts and the Hohenzollerns themselves.
Thus either by negating or by embracing, the Ego may j V '
seek to establish itself in reality. He who, with Marcus •'
Aurelius, can truly say, " O Universe, I wish all that thou
wishest," has a self from which every trace of negativeuess
and obstructiveness has been removed — no wind can blow
except to fill its sails.

A tolerably unanimous opinion ranges the different
selves of which a man may be ' seized and possessed,' and
the consequent different orders of his self-regard, in an
hierarchical scale, with the, bodily Self at the bottom, the
spiritual Self at top, and the extracorporeal material selves
and the various social selves betiveen. Our merely natural
self-seeking would lead us to aggrandize all these selves ;
we give up deliberately only those among them which we

* " The usual mode of lessening the shock of disappointment or dises- i
teem is to contract, if possible, a low estimate of the persons that inllict it. '
Thr's is our remedy for the unjust censures of party spirit, as well as of
personal malignity." (Bain : Emotion and Will, p. 209.)

314 PSYCHOLOGY.

find we caimot keep. Our unselfishness is thus apt to be a
' virtue of necessity ' ; and it is not without all show of rea
son that cynics quote the fable of the fox and the grapes in
describing our progress therein. But this is the moral
education of the race ; and if we agree in the result that
on the whole the selves we can keep are the intrinsically
best, we need not complain of being led to the knowledge
of their superior worth in such a tortuous way.

Of course this is not the only way in which we learn
to subordinate our lower selves to our higher. A direct
ethical judgment unquestionably also plays its part, and last,
not least, we apply to our own persons judgments originally
called forth by the acts of others. It is one of the strangest
laws of our nature that many things which we are well sat
isfied with in ourselves disgust us when seen in others.
, With another man's bodily ' hoggishness ' hardly anyone
I has any sympathy ; — almost as little with his cupidity, his
social vanity and eagerness, his jealousy, his despotism,
and his pride. Left absolutely to myself I should probably
allow all these spontaneous tendencies to luxuriate in me
unchecked, and it would be long before I formed a distinct
notion of the order of their subordination. But having
constantly to pass judgment on my associates, I come ere
long to see, as Herr Horwicz says, my own lusts in the
mirror of the lusts of others, and to think about them in a
very different way from that in which I simply feel. Of
course, the moral generalities which from childhood have
been instilled into me accelerate enormously the advent of
this reflective judgment on myself.

So it comes to pass that, as aforesaid, men have arranged
the various selves which they may seek in an hierarchical
scale according to their worth. A certain amount of bodily
selfishness is required as a basis for all the other selves.
But too much sensuality is despised, or at best condoned
on account of the other qualities of the individual. The
wider material selves are regarded as higher than the
immediate body. He is esteemed a poor creature who is
i unable to forego a little meat and drink and warmth and
sleep for the sake of getting on in the world. The social
self as a whole, again, ranks higher than the materiallself

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 315

as a whole. We must care more for our honor, our friends,
our human ties, than for a sound skin or wealth. And the
spiritual self is so supremely precious that, rather than
lose it, a man ought to be willing to give up friends and
good fame, and property, and life itself.

In each kind of self, material, social, and spiritual, men
distinguish between the immediate and actual, and the re
mote and potential, between the narrower and the wider
view, to the detriment of the former and advantage of the
latter. One must forego a present bodily enjoyment for
the sake of one's general health ; one must abandon the
dollar in the hand for the sake of the hundred dollars to
come ; one must make an enemy of his present interlocutor
if thereby one makes friends of a more valued circle ; one
must go without learning and grace, and wit, the better to
compass one's soul's salvation.

Of all these wider, more potential selves, the potential
^ social self is the most interesting, by reason of certain
apparent paradoxes to which it leads in conduct, and by
reason of its connection with our moral and religious life.
When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the con
demnation of my own family, club, and ' set ' ; when, as a
protestant, I turn catholic ; as a catholic, freethinker ; as a
' regular practitioner,' homoeopath, or what not, I am always
inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the
loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and
better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes
against me now. The ideal social self which I thus seek
in appealing to their decision may be very remote : it may
be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its
realization during my lifetime ; I may even expect the
future generations, which would approve me if they knew
me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone.
jYet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably
j the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least
/ I ivorthy of approving recognition by the highest possible
judging companion, if such companion there be.* This

* It must be observed that the qualities of the Self thus ideally consti-
tuted are all qualities approved by my actual fellows in the first instance ;
and that my reason for now appealing from their verdict to that of the

316 PSYCHOLOGY.

\ self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the perma-
1 nent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute
Mind, the 'Great Companion.' We hear, in these days of
scientific enlightenment, a great deal of discussion about
the efficacy of prayer ; and many reasons are given us why
we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we
should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why
we do pray, which is simply that we cannot help praying.
It seems probable that, in spite of all that ' science ' may do
to the contrary, men will continue to pray to the end of time,
unless their mental nature changes in a manner which
nothing we know should lead us to expect. The impulse

ito pray is a necessary consequence of the fact that whilst
the innermost of the empirical selves of a man is a Self of
the social sort, it yet can find its only adequate Socius in an
ideal world.

All progress in the social Self is the substitution of
higher tribunals for lower ; this ideal tribunal is the high
est; and most men, either continually or occasionally,
carry a reference to it in their breast. The humblest out
cast on this earth can feel himself to be real and valid by
means of this higher recognition. And, on the other hand,
for most of us, a world with no such inner refuge when the
outer social self failed and dropped from us would be the
abyss of horror. I say 'for most of us,' because it is
probable that individuals differ a good deal in the degree
\in which they are haunted by this sense of an ideal specta-
itor. It is a much more essential part of the consciousness
of some men than of others. Those who have the most of
it are possibly the most religious men. But I am sure that
even those who say they are altogether without it deceive
, themselves, and really have it in some degree. Only a
(non-gregarious animal could be completely without it.
Probably no one can make sacrifices for ' right,' without

ideal judge lies in some outward peculiarity of the immediate case. What
once was admired in me as courage has now become in the eyes of men
'impertinence'; what was fortitude is obstinacy; what was fidelity is
now fanaticism. The ideal judge alone, I now believe, can read my
qualities, my willingnesses, my powers, for what they truly are. My
fellows, misled by interest and prejudice, have gone astray.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 317

to some degree personifying the principle of right for
which the sacrifice is made, and expecting thanks from it.
Complete social unselfishness, in other words, can hardly
exist ; complete social suicide hardly occur to a man's mind.
Even such texts as Job's, " Though He slay me yet will I
trust Him," or Marcus Aurelius's, "If gods hate me and
my children, there is a reason for it," can least of all be
cited to prove the contrary. For beyond all doubt Job
revelled in the thought of Jehovah's recognition of the wor
ship after the slaying should have been done ; and the Eoman
emperor felt sure the Absolute Eeason would not be all
indifferent to his acquiescence in the gods' dislike. The
old test of piety, "Are you willing to be damned for the';j
glory of God?" was probably never answered in the affir- '
mative except by those who felt sure in their heart of hearts
that God would ' credit ' them with their willingness, and
set more store by them thus than if in His unfathomable
scheme He had not damned them at all.

All this about the impossibility of suicide is said on the
supposition of positive motives. When possessed by the
emotion of /ear, however, we are in a negative state of mind ;
that is, our desire is limited to the mere banishing of some
thing, without regard to what shall take its place. In this
state of mind there can unquestionably be genuine thoughts,
and genuine acts, of suicide, spiritual and social, as well as
bodily. Anything, anything, at such times, so as to escape !
and not to be ! But such conditions of suicidal frenzy are
pathological in their nature and run dead against every
thing that is regular in the life of the Self in man.

"WHAT SELF IS LOVED IN ' SELF-LOVE 'P

We must now try to interpret the facts of self-love and
self-seeking a little more delicately from within.

A man in whom self-seeking of any sort is largely
developed is said to be selfish.* He is on the other hand

* The kind of selfishness varies with the self that is sought. If it be
the mere bodily self; if a man grabs the best food, the warm corner, the
vacant seat; if he makes room for no one, spits about, and belches in our
faces,— we call it hoggishness. If it be the social self, in the form of popu
larity or influence, for which he is greedy, he may in material ways subor-

318 PSYCHOLOGY.

called unselfish if he shows consideration for the interests of
other selves than his own. Now what is the intimate nature
of the selfish emotion in him? and what is the primary
object of its regard ? We have described him pursuing and
fostering as his self first one set of things and then another ;
we have seen the same set of facts gain or lose interest in his
eyes, leave him indifferent, or fill him either with triumph
or despair according as he made pretensions to appropriate
them, treated them as if they were potentially or actually
parts of himself, or not. We know how little it matters to
us whether some man, a man taken at large and in the
abstract, prove a failure or succeed in life, — he may be
hanged for aught we care, — but we know the utter momen-
tousness and terribleness of the alternative when the man
is the one whose name we ourselves bear, /must not be
a failure, is the very loudest of the voices that clamor in
each of our breasts : let fail who may, I at least must suc
ceed. Now the first conclusion which these facts suggest
is that each of us is animated by a direct feeling of regard
for his oivn pure principle of individual existence, whatever
that may be, taken merely as such. It appears as if all our
concrete manifestations of selfishness might be the conclu
sions of as many syllogisms, each with this principle as the
subject of its major premiss, thus: Whatever is me is
precious ; this is me ; therefore this is precious ; whatever
is mine must not fail ; this is mine ; therefore this must
not fail, etc. It appears, I say, as if this principle inocu
lated all it touched with its own intimate quality of worth ;
as if, previous to the touching, everything might be matter
of indifference, and nothing interesting in its own right ; as
if my regard for my own body even were an interest not
simply in this body, but in this body only so far as it is
mine.

But what is this abstract numerical principle of identity,

dinate himself to others as the best means to his end; and in this case he is
very apt to pass for a disinterested man. If it be the 'other-worldly ' self
which he seeks, and if he seeks it ascetically, — even though he would
rather see all mankind damned eternally than lose his individual soul.—
' saintliness ' will probably be the name by which his selfishness will be
called.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 319

this ' Nnmber One ' within me, for which, according to pro
verbial philosophy, I am supposed to keep so constant a
' lookout ' ? Is it the inner nucleus of my spiritual self, that
collection of obscurely felt ' adjustments,' plus perhaps that
still more obscurely perceived subjectivity as such, of which
we recently spoke? Or is it perhaps the concrete stream
of my thought in its entirety, or some one section of the
same? Or may it be the indivisible Soul-Substance, in
which, according to the orthodox tradition, my faculties
inhere ? Or, finally, can it be the mere pronoun I ? Surely
it is none of these things, that self for which I feel such hot
regard. Though all of them together were put within me,
I should still be cold, and fail to exhibit anything worthy
of the name of selfishness or of devotion to 'Number One.'
To have a self that I can care for, nature must first present
me with some object interesting enough to make me instinc
tively wish to appropriate it for its own sake, and out of it
to manufacture one of those material, social, or spiritual
selves, which we have already passed in review. We shall
find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have
so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contrac
tions of the sphere of what shall be considered me and
mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal
to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and
that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes
n6thing to a reflective source. These objects our con
sciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me.
Whatever other objects, whether by association with the
fate of these, or in any other way, come to be followed with
the same sort of interest, form our remoter and more sec
ondary self. The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they
arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE
designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power
to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a
certain peculiar sort. Let us try to justify this proposition
in detail.

The most palpable selfishness of a man is his bodily
selfishness ; and his most palpable self is the body to which
that selfishness relates. Now I say that he identifies him
self with this body because he loves it, and that he does

820 PSYCHOLOGY.

not love it because lie finds it to be identified with himselt
Keverting to natural history-psychology will help us to see
the truth of this. In the chapter on Instincts we shall
learn that every creature has a certain selective interest in
certain portions of the world, and that this interest is as
often connate as acquired. Our interest in things means
the attention and emotion which the thought of them will
excite, and the actions which their presence will evoke.
Thus every species is particularly interested in its own
prey or food, its own enemies, its own sexual mates, and
its own young. These things fascinate by their intrinsic
power to do so ; they are cared for for their own sakes.

Well, it stands not in the least otherwise with our bod
ies. They too are percepts in our objective field — they are
simply the most interesting percepts there. What happens
to them excites in us emotions and tendencies to action
more energetic and habitual than any which are excited by
other portions of the ' field.' What my comrades call my
bodily selfishness or self-love, is nothing but the sum of
all the outer acts which this interest in my b xly spontane
ously draws from me. My ' selfishness ' is here but a de
scriptive name for grouping together the outward symp
toms which I show. When I am led by self-love to keep
my seat whilst ladies stand, or to grab something first and
cut out my neighbor, what I really love is the comfortable
seat, is the thing itself which I grab. I love them prima
rily, as the mother loves her babe, or a generous man an
heroic deed. Wherever, as here, self-seeking is the out
come of simple instinctive propensity, it is but a name for
certain reflex acts. Something rivets my attention fatally,
and fatally provokes the ' selfish ' response. Could an au
tomaton be so skilfully constructed as to ape these acts, it
would be called selfish as properly as I. It is true that I
am no automaton, but a thinker. But my thoughts, like
my acts, are here concerned only with the outward things.
They need neither know nor care for any pure principle
within. In fact the more utterly ' selfish ' I am in this
primitive way, the more blindly absorbed my thought will
be in the objects and impulses of my lusts, and the more
devoid of any inward looking glance. A baby, whose con-

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 321

sciousness of the pure Ego, of himself as a thinker, is not
usually supposed developed, is, in this way, as some Ger
man has said, ' der vollendeteste Egoist.' His corporeal per
son, and what ministers to its needs, are the only self he
can possibly be said to love. His so-called self-love is but
a name for his insensibility to all but this one set of things,
It may be that he needs a pure principle of subjectivity, a
soul or pure Ego (he certainly needs a stream of thought)
to make him sensible at all to anything, to make him dis
criminate and love uberhaupt, — how that may be, we shall
see ere long ; but this pure Ego, which would then be the
condition of his loving, need no more be the object of his
love than it need be the object of his thought. If his in
terests lay altogether in other bodies than his own, if all
his instincts were altruistic and all his acts suicidal, still he
would need a principle of consciousness just as he does now.
Such a principle cannot then be the principle of his bodily
selfishness any more than it is the principle of any other ten
dency he may show.

So much for the bodily self-love. But my social self-
love, my interest in the images other men have framed of
me, is also an interest in a set of objects external to my
thought. These thoughts in other men's minds are out of
my mind and ' ejective ' to me. They come and go, and
grow and dwindle, and I am puffed up with pride, or blush
with shame, at the result, just as at my success or failure
in the pursuit of a material thing. So that here again, just
as in the former case, the pure principle seems out of the
game as an object of regard, and present only as the general
form or condition under which the regard and the thinking
go on in me at all.

But, it will immediately be objected, this is giving a
mutilated account of the facts. Those images of me in the
minds of other men are, it is true, things outside of me,
whose changes I perceive just as I perceive any other out
ward change. But the pride and shame which I feel are
not concerned merely with those changes. I feel as if some
thing else had changed too, when I perceive my image in
your mind to have changed for the worse, something in me
to which that image belongs, and which a moment ago I felt

322 PSYCHOLOGY.

inside of me, big and strong and lusty, but now weak, con
tracted, and collapsed. Is not this latter change the change
I feel the shame about ? Is not the condition of this thing
inside of me the proper object of my egoistic concern, of my
self-regard ? And is it not, after all, my pure Ego, my bare
numerical principle of distinction from other men, and no
empirical part of me at all ?

No, it is no such pure principle, it is simply my total
empirical selfhood again, my historic Me, a collection ol
objective facts, to which the depreciated image in your mind
' belongs.' In what capacity is it that I claim and demand
a respectful greeting from you instead of this expression of
disdain ? It is not as being a bare I that I claim it ; it is
as being an I who has always been treated with respect,
who belongs to a certain family and ' set,' who has certain
powers, possessions, and public functions, sensibilities,
duties, and purposes, and merits and deserts. All this is
what your disdain negates and contradicts ; this is ' the
thing inside of me ' whose changed treatment I feel the
shame about ; this is what was lusty, and now, in conse
quence of your conduct, is collapsed ; and this certainly is
an empirical objective thing. Indeed, the thing that is felt
modified and changed for the worse during my feeling of
shame is often more concrete even than this, — it is simply
my bodily person, in which your conduct immediately and
without any reflection at all on my part works those
muscular, glandular, and vascular changes which together
make up the ' expression ' of shame. In this instinctive,
reflex sort of shame, the body is just as much the entire
vehicle cf the self-feeling as, in the coarser cases which we
first took up, it was the vehicle of the self-seeking. As, in
simple ' hoggishness,' a succulent morsel gives rise, by the
reflex mechanism, to behavior which the bystanders find
' greedy,' and consider to flow from a certain sort of * self-
regard ; ' so here your disdain gives rise, by a mechanism
quite as reflex and immediate, to another sort of behavior,
which the bystanders call ' shame-faced ' and which they
consider due to another kind of self-regard. But in both
cases there may be no particular self regarded at all by the
mind : and the name self-regard may be only a descriptive

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 323

title imposed from without the reflex acts themselves, and
the feelings that immediately result from their discharge.

After the bodily and social selves come the spiritual.
But which of my spiritual selves do I really care for ? My
Soul-substance? my 'transcendental Ego, or Thinker'?
my pronoun I? my subjectivity as such? my nucleus of
cephalic adjustments ? or my more phenomenal and perish
able powers, my loves and hates, willingnesses and sensibil
ities, and the like ? Surely the latter. But they, relatively
to the central principle, whatever it may be, are external
and objective. They come and go, and it remains — "so
shakes the magnet, and so stands the pole." It may indeed
have to be there for them to be loved, but being there is
not identical with being loved itself.

To sum up, then, we see no reason to suppose that self-love '
is primarily, or secondarily, or ever, love for one's mere princi
ple of consents identity. It is always love for something
which, as compared with that principle, is superficial, tran
sient, liable to be taken up or dropped at will.

And zoological psychology again comes to the aid of
our understanding and shows us that this must needs be
so. In fact, in answering the question what things it is that
a man loves in his self-love, we have implicitly answered the
farther question, of why he loves them.

Unless his consciousness were something more than
cognitive, unless it experienced a partiality for certain of
the objects, which, in succession, occupy its ken, it could
not long maintain itself in existence ; for, by an inscrutable
necessity, each human mind's appearance on this earth is
conditioned upon the integrity of the body with which it
belongs, upon the treatment which that body gets from
others, and upon the spiritual dispositions which use it as
their tool, and lead it either towards longevity or to destruc
tion. Its own body, then, first of all, its friends ne.rt, and
finally if s spiritual dispositions, MUST be the supremely in-
'eresting OBJECTS for each human mind,. Each mind, to
begin with, must have a certain minimum of selfishness in
the shape of instincts of bodily self-seeking in order to exist.
This minimum must be there as a basis for all farther con
scious acts, whether of self-negation or of a selfishness

824 PSYCHOLOGY.

more subtle still. All minds must have come, by the way
of the survival of the fittest, if by no directer path, to take
an intense interest in the bodies to which they are yoked,
altogether apart from any interest in the pure Ego which
they also possess.

And similarly with the images of their person in the
minds of others. I should not be extant now had I not be
come sensitive to looks of approval or disapproval on the
faces among which my life is cast. Looks of contempt cast
on other persons need affect me in no such peculiar way.
Were my mental life dependent exclusively on some other
person's welfare, either directly or in an indirect way, then
natural selection would unquestionably have brought it
about that I should be as sensitive to the social vicissitudes
of that other person as I now am to my own. Instead of
being egoistic I should be spontaneously altruistic, then.
But in this case, only partially realized in actual human
conditions, though the self I empirically love would have
changed, my pure Ego or Thinker would have to remain
just what it is now.

My spiritual powers, again, must interest me more than
those of other people, and for the same reason. I should
not be here at all unless I had cultivated them and kept
them from decay. And the same law which made me once
care for them makes me care for them still.

My own body and what ministers to its needs are thus the
primitive object, instinctively deter mined, of my egoistic interests.
Other objects may become interesting derivatively through
association with any of these things, either as means or as
habitual concomitants ; and so in a thousand ways the primi
tive sphere of the egoistic emotions may enlarge and change
its boundaries.

This sort of interest is really the meaning of tJie tvord
'my.' Whatever has it is eo ipso a part of me. My child,
my friend dies, and where he goes I feel that part of my*
self now is and evermore shall be :

" For this losing is true dying ;
This is lordly man's down-lying ;
This his slow but sure reclining,
Star by star his world resigning."

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 325

The fact remains, however, that certain special sorts of
thing tend primordially to possess this interest, and form
the natural me. But all these things are objects, properly
so called, to the subject which does the thinking.* And
this latter fact upsets at once the dictum of the old-fash
ioned sensationalist psychology, that altruistic passions
and interests are contradictory to the nature of things, and
that if they appear anywhere to exist, it must be as second
ary products, resolvable at bottom into cases of selfishness,
taught by experience a hypocritical disguise. If the zoolog
ical and evolutionary point of view is the true one, there is
uo reason why any object whatever might not arouse passion
and interest as primitively and instinctively as any other,
whether connected or not with the interests of the me.
The phenomenon of passion is in origin and essence the
same, whatever be the target upon which it is discharged ;
and what the target actually happens to be is solely a ques
tion of fact. I might conceivably be as much fascinated,
and as primitively so, by the care of my neighbor's body
as by the care of my own. The only check to such exuber
ant altruistic interests is natural selection, which would
weed out such as Avere very harmful to the individual or to
his tribe. Many such interests, however, remain unweeded
out — the interest in the opposite sex, for example, which
seems in mankind stronger than is called for by its utili
tarian need ; and alongside of them remain interests, like
that in alcoholic intoxication, or in musical sounds, which,
for aught we can see, are without any utility whatever.
The sympathetic instincts and the egoistic ones are thus
co-ordinate. They arise, so far as we can tell, on the same
psychologic level. The only difference between them is,
that the instincts called egoistic form much the larger mass.

The only author whom I know to have discussed the
question whether the ' pure Ego,' per se, can be an object
of regard, is Herr Horwicz, in his extremely able and acute
Psychologische Analysen. He too says that all self-regard
is regard for certain objective things. He disposes so well

* Lotze, Med. Psych. 498-501 ; Microcosmos, bk. n. chap. v. §§ 3, 4

326 PSYCHOLOGY.

of one kind of objection that I must conclude by quoting a
part of his own words :
First, the objection :

" The fact is indubitable that one's own children always pass for
the prettiest and brightest, the wine from one's own cellar for the best
— at least for its price, — one's own house and horses for the finest.
With what tender admiration do we con over our own little deed of
Denevolence ! our own frailties and misdemeanors, how ready we are to
acquit ourselves for them, when we notice them at all, on the ground of
* extenuating circumstances ' ! How much more really comic are our
own jokes than those of others, which, unlike ours, will not bear being
repeated ten or twelve times over ! How eloquent, striking, powerful,
our own speeches are ! How appropriate our own address ! In short,
how much more intelligent, soulful, better, is everything about us than
in anyone else. The sad chapter of artists' and authors' conceit and
vanity belongs here.

''The prevalence of this obvious preference which we feel for every
thing of our own is indeed striking. Does it not look as if our dear Ego
must first lend its color and flavor to anything in order to make it please
us ? ... Is it not the simplest explanation for all these phenomena, so
consistent among themselves, to suppose that the Ego, the self, which
forms the origin and centre of our thinking life, is at the same time the
original and central object of our life of feeling, and the ground both
of whatever special ideas and of whatever special feelings ensue ?"

Herr Horwicz goes on to refer to what we have already
noticed, that various things which disgust us in others do
not disgust us at all in ourselves.

" To most of us even the bodily warmth of another, for example the
chair warm from another's sitting, is felt unpleasantly, whereas there
is nothing disagreeable in the warmth of the chair in which we have
been sitting ourselves."

After some further remarks, he replies to these facts
and reasonings as follows :

"We may with confidence affirm that our own possessions in most
cases please us better [not because they are ours], but simply because we
know them better, 'realize' them more intimately, feel them more
deeply. We learn to appreciate what is ours in all its details and shad-
ings, whilst the goods of others appear to us in coarse outlines and rude
averages. Here are some examples: A piece of music which one plays
one's self is heard and understood better than when it is played by an
other. We get more exactly all the details, penetrate more deeply into
the musical thought. We may meanwhile perceive perfectly well that
the other person is the better performer, and yet nevertheless — at times
—get more enjoyment from our own playing because it brings the

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 327

melody and harmony so much nearer home to us. This case may almost
be taken as typical for the other cases of self-love. On close examina
tion, we shall almost always find that a great part of our feeling about
what is ours is due to the fact that we live closer to our own things, and
so feel them more thoroughly and deeply. As a friend of mine was
about to marry, he often bored me by the repeated and minute way in
which he would discuss the details of his new household arrangements.
I wondered that so intellectual a man should be so deeply interested in
things of so external a nature. But as I entered, a few years later, the
same condition myself, these matters acquired for me an entirely differ
ent interest, and it became my turn to turn them over and talk of them
unceasingly. . . . The reason was simply this, that in the first instance
I understood nothing of these things and their importance for domestic
comfort, whilst in the latter case they came home to me with irresistible
urgency, and vividly took possession of my fancy. So it is with many
a one who mocks at decorations and titles, until he gains one himself.
And this is also surely the reason why one's own portrait or reflection in
the mirror is so peculiarly interesting a thing to contemplate . . . not on
account of any absolute ' c'est moi,"1 but just as with the music played
by ourselves. What greets our eyes is what we know best, most deeply
understand; because we ourselves have felt it and lived through it. We
know what has ploughed these furrows, deepened these shadows,
blanched this hair ; and other faces may be handsomer, but none can
speak to us or interest us like this." *

Moreover, this author goes on to show that our own
things are fuller for us than those of others because of the
memories they aAvaken and the practical hopes and expecta
tions they arouse. This alone would emphasize them, apart
from any value derived from their belonging to ourselves.
We may conclude with him, then, that an original central
self -feeling can never explain the passionate warmth of our self-
regarding emotions, ivhich must, on the contrary, be addressed
directly to special things less abstract and empty of content. To
these things the name of ' self ' may be given, or to our conduct
towards them the, name, of ' selfishness,' Imt neither in the self
nor the selfishness does the pure Thinker play the 'title-role.'

Only one more point connected with our self-regard need
be mentioned. We have spoken of it so far as active in~
stinct or emotion. It remains to speak of it as cold intel
lectual self-estimation. We may weigh our own Me in the»

* Psychologische Analysen auf Physiologischer Grundlage. Theil n.
lite Hillfte, § 11. The whole section ought to be read.

328 PSYCHOLOGY.

balance of praise and blame as easily as we weigh other
people, — though with difficulty quite as fairly. The just
man is the one who can weigh himself impartially. Impar-
tial weighing presupposes a rare faculty of abstraction from
the vividness with which, as Herr Horwicz has pointed out,
things known as intimately as our own possessions and
performances appeal to our imagination ; and an equally
rare power of vividly representing the affairs of others. But>
granting these rare powers, there is no reason why a man
should not pass judgment on himself quite as objectively
and well as on anyone else. No matter how he feels about
himself, unduly elated or unduly depressed, he may still
truly know his own worth by measuring it by the outward
standard he applies to other men, and counteract the injus
tice of the feeling he cannot wholly escape. This self-
measuring process has nothing to do with the instinctive
self-regard we have hitherto been dealing with. Being
merely ono application of intellectual comparison, it need
no longer detain us here. Please note again, however, how
the pure Ego appears merely as the vehicle in which the
estimation is carried on, the objects estimated being all of
them facts of an empirical sort, * one's body, one's credit,

* Professor Bain, in his chapter on 'Emotions of Self,' does scant jus
tice to the primitive nature of a large part of our self-feeling, and seems to
reduce it to reflective self-estimation of this sober intellectual sort, which
certainly most of it is not. He says that when the attention is turned
inward upon self as a Personality, " we are putting forth to wards ourselves
the kind of exercise that properly accompanies our contemplation of other
persons. We are accustomed to scrutinize the actions and conduct of those
about us, to set a higher value upon one man than upon another, by com
paring the two; to pity ono in distress; to feel complacency towards a par
ticular individual; to congratulate a man on some good fortune that it
pleases us to see him gain; to admire greatness or excellence as displayed
*>y any of our fellows. All these exercises are intrinsically social, like
Love and Resentment; an isolated individual could never attain to them,
nor exercise then. By what means, then, through what fiction [!] can we
turn round r.nd play them off upon self? Or how comes it that we obtain
any satisfaction Ly putting self in the place of the other party? Perhaps
the simplest form of the reflected act is that expressed by Self -worth and
Self-estimation, based and begun upon observation of the ways and con
duct of our fellow-beings. We soon make comparisons among the indi
viduals about us; we see that one is stronger and does more work than
another, and, in consequence perhaps, receives more pay. We see one
putting forth perhaps more kindness than another, and in consequence

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF.

329

one's fame, one's intellectual ability, one's goodness, or
whatever the case may be.

The empirical Life of Self is divided, as below, into

MATERIAL.

SOCIAL.

SPIRITUAL.

SELF-
SEEKING.

Bodily Appetites
and Instincts
Love of Adorn
ment, Foppery,
Acquisitiveness,
Constructiveness,
Love of Home, etc.

Desire to please, be
noticed, admired,
etc.
Sociability, Emula
tion, Envy, Love,
Pursuit of Honor,
Ambition, etc.

Intellectual, Moral
and Religious
Aspiration, Con
scientiousness

SELF-
ESTIMATION.

Personal Vanity,
Modesty, etc.
Pride of Wealth,
Fear of Poverty

Social and Family
Pride, Vainglory,
Snobbery, Humil
ity, Shame, etc.

Sense of Moral or
Mental Superior
ity, Purity, etc.
Sense of Inferiority
or of Guilt

THE PURE EGO.

Having summed up in the above table the principal
results of the chapter thus far, I have said all that need

receiving more love. We see some individuals surpassing the rest in aston
ishing feats, and drawing after them the gaze and admiration of a crowd.
We acquire a series of fixed associations towards persons so situated; favor
able in the case of the superior, and unfavorable to the inferior. To the
strong and laborious man we attach an estimate of greater reward, and feel
that to be in his place would be a hap pier lot than falls to others. Desiring,
as we do, from the primary motives of our being, to possess good things,
and observing these to come by a man's superior exertions, we feel a respect
for such exertion and a wish that it might be ours. We know that we also
put forth exertions for our share uf good things; and on witnessing others,
we are apt to be reminded of ourselves and to make comparisons with our
selves, which comparisons derive their interest from the substantial conse
quences. Having thus once learned to look at other persons as per-
iOrming labors, greater or less, and as realizing fruits to accord; being,
moreover, in all respects like our fellows, — we find it an exercise neither
difficult nor unmeaning to contemplate self as doing work and receiving
the reward. ... As we decide between one man and another, — which is
worthier, ... so we decide between self and all other men; being, how
ever, in this decision under the bias of our own desires." A couple of pages
farther on we read: "By the terms Self-complacency. Self-gratulation, is
indicated a positive enjoyment in dwelling upon our own merits and
belongings. As in other modes, so here, the starting point is the contem
plation of excellence or pleasing qualities in another person, accompanied
more or less with fondness or love." Self-pity is also regarded by Professor

330 PSYCHOLOGY.

be said of the constituents of the phenomenal self, and
of the nature of self-regard. Our decks are consequently
sleared for the struggle with that pure principle of personal
identity which has met us all along our preliminary expo
sition, but which we have always shied from and treated as
a difficulty to be postponed. Ever since Hume's time, it
has been justly regarded as the most puzzling puzzle with
which psychology has to deal ; and whatever view one may
espouse, one has to hold his position against heavy odds.
If, with the Spiritualists, one contend for a substantial soul,
or transcendental principle of unity, one can give no positive
account of what that may be. And if, with the Humians,
one deny such a principle and say that the stream of pass-
ing thoughts is all, one runs against the entire common-
sense of mankind, of which the belief in a distinct principle
of selfhood seems an integral part. Whatever solution be
adopted in the pages to come, we may as well make up our
minds in advance that it will fail to satisfy the majority of
those to whom it is addressed. The best way of approach-
ing the matter will be to take up first —

The Sense of Personal Identity.

In the last chapter it was stated in as radical a way as
possible that the thoughts which we actually know to exist
do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one

Bain, in this place, as an emotion diverted to ourselves from a more im
mediate object, "in a manner that we may term fictitious and unreal.
Still, as we can view self in the light of another person, we can feel towards
it the emotion of pity called forth by others in our situation."

This account of Prof essor Bain's is, it will be observed, a good specimen
of the old-fashioned mode of explaining the several emotions as rapid cal
culations of results, and the transfer of feeling from one object to another,
associated by contiguity or similarity with the first. Zoological evolu
tionism, which came up since Prof essor Bain first wrote, has made us see, on
the contrary, that many emotions must be primitively aroused by special
objects. None are more worthy of being ranked primitive than the self-
gratulation and humiliation attendant on our own successes and failures in
the main functions of life. We need no borrowed reflection for these feel
ings. Professor Bain's account applies to but that small fraction of our
self-feeling which reflective criticism can add to, or subtract from, the
total mass.— Lotze has some pages on the modifications of our self-regard
by universal judgments, in Microcosmus, book v. chap, v § 5.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 331

thinker and not to another. Each thought, out of a multi
tude of other thoughts of -which it may think, is able to
distinguish those which belong to its own Ego from those
which do not. The former have a warmth and intimacy
about them of which the latter are completely devoid, being
merely conceived, in a cold and foreign fashion, and not
appearing as blood-relatives, bringing their greetings to us
from out of the past.

Now this consciousness of personal sameness may be
treated either as a subjective phenomenon or as an objec
tive deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. We may ex
plain how one bit of thought can come to judge other bits
to belong to the same Ego with itself ; or we may criticise
its judgment and decide how far it may tally with the
nature of things.

As a mere subjective phenomenon the judgment presents
no difficulty or mystery peculiar to itself. It belongs to
the great class of judgments of sameness; and there is
nothing more remarkable in making a judgment of same
ness in the first person than in the second or the third.
The intellectual operations seem essentially alike, whether
I say "I am the same,' or whether I say 'the pen is the
same, as yesterday.' It is as easy to think this as to think
the opposite and say 'neither I nor the pen is the same.'

This sort of bringing of tldngs together into the object of a
single judgment is of course essential to all thinking. The
things are conjoined in the thought, whatever may be the
relation in which they appear to the thought. The thinking
them is thinking them together, even if only with the result
of judging that they do not belong together. This sort of
subjective synthesis,, essential to knowledge as siich (when
ever it has a complex object), must not be confounded with
objective synthesis or union instead of difference or discon
nection, known among the things.* The subjective syn-

* "Also nur dadurch, dass ich em Maunigfaltiges gegebeuer Vorstel-
lungeu iu einem Bewusstsein verbinden kann, ist es moglich dass ich die
Identittit des Bewusstseins in diesen Vorstellungen selbst vorstelle, d. h. die
analytische Einheit der Apperception ist nur unter der Voraussetzung irgend
eiuer synthetischen m5glich." In this passage (Kritik der reineu Ver-
uunft, 2te Anil. § 16) Kant calls by the names of analytic and synthetic

332 PSYCHOLOGY.

thesis is involved in thought's mere existence. Even a
really disconnected world could only be known to be such
by having its parts temporarily united in the Object of some
pulse of consciousness.*

The sense of personal identity is not, then, this mere
synthetic form essential to all thought. It is the sense of a
sameness perceived by thought and predicated of things
thought-about. These things are a present self and a self
of yesterday. The thought not only thinks them both, but
thinks that they are identical. The psychologist, looking on
and playing the critic, might prove the thought wrong, and
show there was no real identity, — there might have been no
yesterday, or, at any rate, no self of yesterday ; or, if there
were, the sameness predicated might not obtain, or might
be predicated on insufficient grounds. In either case the
personal identity would not exist as a fact; but it would
exist as a feeling all the same ; the consciousness of it by
the thought would be there, and the psychologist would
still have to analyze that, and show where its illusoriness
lay. Let us now be the psychologist and see whether it be
right or wrong when it says, / am the same self that I was
yesterday.

We may immediately call it right and intelligible so fai
as it posits a past time with past thoughts or selves con
tained therein — these were data which we assumed at the
outset of the book. Right also and intelligible so far as it
thinks of a present self — that present self we have just
studied in its various forms. The only question for us is
as to what the consciousness may mean when it calls the

apperception what we here mean by objective and subjective synthesis
respectively. It were much to be desired that some one might invent a
good pair of terms in which to record the distinction — those used in the
text are certainly very bad, but Kant's seem to me still worse. ' Categorical
unity' and 'transcendental synthesis' would also be good Kantian, but
hardly good human, speech.

* So that we might say, by a sort of bad pun, "only a connected world
can be known as disconnected." I say bad pun, because the point of view
shifts between the connectedness and the disconnectedness. The discon
nectedness is of the realities known ; the connectedness is of the knowl
edge of them ; and reality and knowledge of it are, from the psychological
point of view held fast to in these pages, two different facts.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 333

present self the same with one of the past selves which it
has in mind.

We spoke a moment since of warmth and intimacy.
This leads us to the answer sought. For, whatever the
thought we are criticising may think about its present self,
that self comes to its acquaintance, or is actually felt, with
warmth and intimacy. Of course this is the case with the
bodily part of it ; we feel the whole cubic mass of our body
all the while, it gives us an unceasing sense of personal
existence. Equally do we feel the inner ' nucleus of the
spiritual self,' either in the shape of yon faint physiological
adjustments, or (adopting the universal psychological be
lief), in that of the pure activity of our thought taking
place as such. Our remoter spiritual, material, and social
selves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glow
and a warmth ; for the thought of them infallibly brings
some degree of organic emotion in the shape of quickened
heart-beats, oppressed breathing, or some other alteration,
even though it be a slight one, in the general bodily tone.
The character of ' warmth,' then, in the present self, re
duces itself to either of two things, — something in the feel
ing which we have of the thought itself, as thinking, or else
the feeling of the body's actual existence at the moment, —
or finally to both. "We cannot realize our present self with
out simultaneously feeling one or other of these two things.
Any other fact which brings these two things with it into
consciousness will be thought with a warmth and an inti
macy like those which cling to the present self.

Any distant self which fulfils this condition will be
thought with such warmth and intimacy. But which
distant selves do fulfil the condition, when represented?

Obviously those, and only those, which fulfilled it when
they were alive. Them we shall imagine with the animal
warmth upon them, to them may possibly cling the aroma,
the echo of the thinking taken in the act. And by a natural
consequence, we shall assimilate them to each other and
to the warm and intimate self we now feel within us as we
think, and separate them as a collection from whatever
selves have not this mark, much as out of a herd of cattle
let loose for the winter on some wide western prairie the

334 PSYCHOLOGY.

owner picks out and sorts together when the time for the
round-up comes in the spring, all the beasts on which he
finds his own particular brand.

The various members of the collection thus set apart
are felt to belong with each other whenever they are
thought at all. The animal warmth, etc., is their herd-mark,
the brand from which they can never more escape. It
runs through them all like a thread through a chaplet and
makes them into a whole, which we treat as a unit, no
matter how much in other ways the parts may differ inter
se. Add to this character the farther one that the distant
selves appear to our thought as having for hours of time
been continuous with each other, and the most recent ones
of them continuous with the Self of the present moment,
melting into it by slow degrees ; and we get a still stronger
bond of union. As we think we see an identical bodily
thing when, in spite of changes of structure, it exists con
tinuously before our eyes, or when, however interrupted its
presence, its quality returns unchanged ; so here we think
we experience an identical Self when it appears to us in an
analogous way. Continuity makes us unite what dissimi
larity might otherwise separate ; similarity makes us unite
what discontinuity might hold apart. And thus it is,
finally, that Peter, awakening in the same bed with Paul,
and recalling what both had in mind before they went to
sleep, reidentifies and appropriates the ' warm ' ideas as his,
and is never tempted to confuse them with those cold and
pale-appearing ones which he ascribes to Paul. As well
might he confound Paul's body, which he only sees, with
his own body, which he sees but also feels. Each of us
when he awakens says, Here's the same old self again, just
as he says, Here's the same old bed, the same old room, the
came old world.

The sense of our own personal identity, then, is exactly like-
any one of our other perceptions of sameness among phenomena.
It is a conclusion grounded either on the resemblance in a funda
mental respect, or on the continuity before the mind, of the phe
nomena compared.

And it must not be taken to mean more than these
grounds warrant, or treated as a sort of metaphysical or

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 335

absolute Unity in which all differences are overwhelmed.
The past aiid present selves compared are the same just so
far as they are the same, and no farther. A uniform feeling
of * warmth,' of bodily existence (or an equally uniform feel
ing of pure psychic energy?) pervades them all ; and this is
what gives them a generic unity, and makes them the same
in kind. But this generic unity coexists with generic differ
ences just as real as the unity. And if from the one point
of view they are one self, from others they are as truly
not one but many selves. And similarly of the attribute of
continuity ; it gives its own kind of unity to the self — that
of mere connectedness, or unbrokenness, a perfectly definite
phenomenal thing — but it gives not a jot or tittle more.
And this unbrokenness in the stream of selves, like the
uubrokeuness in an exhibition of ' dissolving views,' in no
wise implies any farther unity or contradicts any amount
of plurality in other respects.

And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and
the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal iden
tity goes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotes
about our infant years, but we do not appropriate them as
W3 do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum
awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency.
That child is a foreign creature with which our present
self is no more identified in feeling than it is with some
stranger's living child to-day. Why ? Partly because
great time-gaps break up all these early years — we cannot
ascend to them by continuous memories ; and partly be
cause no representation of how the child felt comes up with
the stories. We know what he said and did ; but no senti
ment of his little body, of his emotions, of his psychic striv
ings as they felt to him., comes up to contribute an element
of warmth and intimacy to the narrative we hear, and the
main bond of union with our present self thus disappears.
ft is the same with certain of our dimly-recollected experi
ences. We hardly know whether to appropriate them or
to disown them as fancies, or things read or heard and not
lived through. Their animal heat has evaporated ; the feel
ings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or

336 PSYCHOLOGY.

so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of
identity can be decisively cast.

Resemblance among tike parts of a continuum of feelings
(especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things
widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real
and verifiable 'personal identity ' ivhich ice feel. There is
no other identity than this in the ' stream ' of subjective
consciousness which we described in the last chapter. Its
parts differ, but under all their differences they are knit
in these two ways ; and if either way of knitting disappears,
the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine
day unable to recall any of his past experiences, so that
he has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recalls
the facts of it in a cold abstract way as things that he is sure
once happened ; or if, without this loss of memory, his
bodily and spiritual habits all change during the night, each
organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought becom
ing aware of itself in a different way ; lie feels, and he says,
that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me,
gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with
nothing from out of the older time. Such cases are not
rare in mental pathology ; but, as we still have some rea
soning to do, we had better give no concrete account of
them until the end of the chapter.

This description of personal identity will be recognized
by the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professed
by the empirical school. Associationists in England and
France, Herbartians in Germany, all describe the Self as
an aggregate of which each part, as to its being, is a separate
fact. So far so good, then ; thus much is true whatevei
farther things may be true ; and it is to the imperishable
glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have
taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of
the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifia
ble thing.

But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sum
of passing things is all, these writers have neglected certain
more subtle aspects of the Unity of Consciousness, to which
we next must turn.

THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 33T

Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us. It
will be remembered that the beasts were brought together
into one herd because their owner found on each of them
his brand. The ' owner ' symbolizes here that ' section ' of
consciousness, or pulse of thought, which we have all along
represented as the vehicle of the judgment of identity ; and
the ( brand ' symbolizes the characters of warmth and con
tinuity, by reason of which the judgment is made. There
is found a seZ/'-brand, just as there is found a herd-brand.
Each brand, so far, is the mark, or cause of our know
ing, that certain things belong-together. But if the brand
is the ratio cognoscendi of the belonging, the belonging,
in the case of the herd, is in turn the ratio existendi oi
the brand. No beast would be so branded unless he be
longed to the owner of the herd. They are not his because
they are branded ; they are branded because they are his.
So that it seems as if our description of the belonging-
together of the various selves, as a belonging-together which
is merely represented, in a later pulse of thought, had
knocked the bottom out of the matter, and omitted the
most characteristic one of all the features found in the herd
— a feature which common-sense finds in the phenomenon
of personal identity as well, and for our omission of which
she will hold us to a strict account. For common-sense
insists that the unity of all the selves is not a mere ap
pearance of similarity or continuity, ascertained after the
fact. She is sure that it involves a real belonging to a real
Owner, to a pure spiritual entity of some kind. Eolation
to this entity is what makes the self's constituents stick to
gether as they do for thought. The individual beasts do
not stick together, for all that they wear the same brand,
Each wanders with whatever accidental mates it finds. The
herd's unity is only potential, its centre ideal, like the
* centre of gravity ' in physics, until the herdsman or owner
comes. He furnishes a real centre of accretion to which
the beasts are driven and by which they are held. The
beasts stick together by sticking severally to him. Just so,
common-sense insists, there must be a real proprietor in
the case of the selves, or else their actual accretion into a
' personal consciousness ' would never have taken place.

388 PSYCHOLOGY.

To the usual empiricist explanation of personal conscious.
ness this is a formidable reproof, because all the individual
thoughts and feelings which have succeeded each other ' up
to date ' are represented by ordinary Associationism as in
some inscrutable way ' integrating ' or gumming themselves
together on their own account, and thus fusing into a stream.
A.11 the incomprehensibilities which in Chapter VI we sa